Amateur Tryniski builds collection of digital newspaper archives

From Dick Eastman at EOGN.com on March 5, 2013:

One computer expert working alone has built a collection of digitized historic newspapers at http://fultonhistory.com/ that is much bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend. Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath. His site presently has more than 21,790,000 old New York State historical newspaper pages. He now is also adding newspapers from other states.

Tryniski’s site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress’ historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page. In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.

Read the full article here: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/03/tom-tryniski-digitizes-more-newspapers-than-the-better-known-web-sites.html



Originally published: March 6, 2013. Last Updated: March 6, 2013.