Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Small Town Papers now FREE to access

I received this in email from Paul Jeffko of Small Town Papers today:

"I wanted to let you know that we are making the SmallTownPapers Collection available free. Instead of a membership fee paywall, we are working with Google on a new monetization model they developed for publishers (like us) that have high-value premium content. Anyone can gain access to our content by answering a survey question.

"Google calls the system a "micro-survey". They have customers who pay them to conduct market research. We earn revenue from each user completed survey. Each "survey" is a single or sometimes a 2-part question. For each new page loaded, users will answer a survey question, which takes only a few seconds.

"To access the available free content, users visit www.smalltownpapers.com, select a title, then look for the link "Scanned Archives of ... <title> ". From there you can search or browse the available archives. There are about a half a million pages available now, and we are adding thousands of pages daily.

"All of the pages and corresponding OCR text are also indexed by Google, so users can do a Google Advanced Search along with "Newspaper Archive of <title>".

"Users are invited to contact us about specific titles found on the SmallTownPapers website that they would like to have more pages made available. For example, if a user wants more pages for the "Shelton-Mason County Journal" from say, 1965, they can let us know and we'll attempt to get those pages uploaded."


The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/05/small-town-papers-now-free-to-access.html


2 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

Thanks for sharing this info, Randy. I'll start adding these titles to my Online Historical Newspapers site. Previously, you had to have a subscription via NewspaperARCHIVE.com or Fold3 (which just recently stopped contracting with STN) in order to access their archives.

Britney Palmer said...

This is a wonderful website buddy and an informative post!!! i am new here and i found this site very interesting and informative ,, you are a professional blogger i think i have a great interest in such things…thank you for the post buddy and keep on posting nice stuff like this in future as well.
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