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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Exploring Historical Newspaper Pages with Veridian with Lisa Louise Cooke
00:12:19
In this episode of Best Websites, Lisa Louise Cooke highlights some of the most valuable features of Veridian, an excellent resource for finding historical newspapers.
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Foreign welcome to the Best Websites podcast from Family Tree Magazine, where we spotlight the most useful, innovative and downright exciting online tools for family historians. I am your host, Lisa Louise Cook. And today we are diving into a resource that can potentially open a whole new avenue in your research. It's Viridian newspaper collections. Now, if you've ever wished that you could leaf through the Pages of a 19th century hometown paper without traveling hundreds of miles to go look at it, or without worrying about damaging the fragile originals, this episode is for you. I want you to picture something. You're at your computer, your coffee is in your hand, you type in your great grandmother's name, and seconds later you're looking at her wedding announcement from 1897. It tells you the church, the names of her bridesmaids, even that she carried a bouquet of white roses. That's not just a record, it's a story. And Viridian makes finds like this possible from home. So what is Viridian? Well, it is a software platform. It's developed by DL Consulting, they are in New Zealand, and it powers dozens of digital newspaper archives worldwide. Each of these are managed by its own library archive or historical society. You can kind of think of Viridian as the engine behind the scenes. It's giving these institutions the the tools to digitize their collections, make them searchable, and of course, share them online. Well, some collections are massive, like the California Digital Newspaper collection, which contains millions of pages stretching back to 1846. Others are very specialized, like the Hoji Shinbun Digital collection, which documents Japanese language newspapers from the late 19th century onward. And when you add them all up, Viridian powered archives now offer over 110 million digitized newspaper pages. And the number is growing all the time. And these aren't just scans. Thanks to ocr, which of course is optical character recognition. They're searchable by name, date, place and keyword. That means that you can find a mention buried deep in the classifieds or a one sentence note in the local news column that perhaps mentions somebody from your family. Browsing is a lot of fun, but really targeted searching is going to save you a lot of time. So I want to share with you some of my favorite styles search strategies over@viridiansoftware.com so you'll want to click on projects in the main menu at the top of the screen and then you'll see a lot of different boxes with projects listed. You're going to click newspaper collections. Then you can kind of scroll down and you just start seeing them. Listed there, they are shown in alphabetical order. And they all come from really very diverse organizations. So you'll see the Catholic News Archive or the Boston College Newspapers, or Cambridge Public Library, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, which I mentioned to you before. So there's quite a few here. And unfortunately, as you're looking through the collections page, there really isn't an easy way to filter this down by place and time. So it's not that big of a page, really. This is a case of if they've got what you need, you are in luck, go for it. But it only takes a few minutes to figure that out. And if they don't have what you need, you can move on to the next newspaper website. So literally, just scroll down the page, take a look at each one of them. It'll give you the name. It'll kind of give you an idea of what the collection includes, the time frame, maybe that it captures the type of newspapers, whether it's a student published newspaper at a university or whether it was a regular newspaper in a local community. So just scroll through there and see what you find. I see one here. It's the Indiana State Library, Hoosier State Chronicles. And it says that several hundred newspaper titles from the Indiana State Library, the collection contains over 1.2 million million newspaper pages. So if I look need to do some research in Indiana, which actually I do, I'm going to click on Explore the Hoosier State Chronicles. From there, it's going to link you over to their website. So this has taken you off of the Veridian website and really connected you to the organization that originally worked with Viridian to get their collection digitized and put together in a website that's really usable. And it's really the technology that Viridian brings to this scenario that pays off. Because you'll notice, for example, at the Hoosier State Chronicles site, which is newspapers.library. in that website, you see not only featured collections, information about the collection itself links to browsing the collection by title, by date, or also by tags, which can come in really handy if you want to search by topic. But you also see an interactive map. This is so cool. So it's a map of Indiana, and all of the counties are laid out here. And you'll notice when they do this interactive map thing that the ones that are a little bit grayed out, they don't have newspapers in that area. But as you hover your mouse over the other counties, the ones that are white, you will find they light up blue. And it tells you, yes, they do have newspapers for that location. So if I click on, oh, they've got Randolph county. Okay, so I'm going to click on Randolph County. And that takes me to a long list, shows all the counties. But most importantly, what I'm seeing here is that Randolph county, it's listing all of the newspapers that they have for Randolph County, Indiana. They have the. The Randolph County Journal, just the Randolph Journal, the Winchester Journal. So I can click one of those links, and then you're going to see something that's sort of reminiscent of Chronicling America, where they have a calendar view. So now we've, we've drilled into the place. We are trying to zero in on the time frame that we need. So I see here that it says available online is December 31st of 1857 through December 19th of 1861. They have 202 issues. And then there is a calendar grid here. So I can pick 1859. And I want to click on May. And then from there it'll show me, oh, this looks like it was a newspaper that was published once a week, looks like on Thursdays. So you could click on an individual issue for an individual day. And that's going to start taking you into the digitized pages. Now, if you're not crazy about the calendar view, you can always click and just see a list view of all of these. And I would imagine each of these organizations who have worked with Viridian software to put their newspapers online has probably made some custom selections as how they want to present their materials. I think generally you're going to find that this is fairly consistent the way this is laid out, but it might vary from website to website based on what their specific needs were. And of course, on this website, there is also a search feature, so don't miss the menu at the top of the screen. You can click search and then start putting in your keywords. You can also search by titles, tags we mentioned, and there's even a blog and a help page kind of helps you dig even further. So really what we're talking about here is that viridiansoftware.com is this engine behind these new collections and the way in which they are bringing them to the Internet. They're also starting to incorporate, of course, artificial intelligence and bringing semantic search, in which, you know, we're used to our keyword search, but semantic search kind of understands the language that we put in. So if we're not quite sure what we're looking for, we just want to describe it. You might still find some. Some good things that way, just because this new technology is able to really understand the sentences, the. The strings of information that you're putting in, and hopefully helping you find some of that in the newspapers as well. So this website we've been talking about is viridiansoftware.com these are the people who are experts in digital collections. We're going to go to the projects page, hit the newspapers. But you'll notice on the projects page there's more than just newspapers. You'll also see public libraries, historical societies, archives, audio collections. They've broken out school newspapers and universities. So there is a lot here to look at. You could also, of course, do Google searching to try to find some of these things. But it's very convenient to be able to come to Veridian Software and see these projects all in one place. And that's why Veridian newspaper collections and the veridiansoftware.com website have earned their place on Family Tree magazine's list of best websites for genealogy. And one last thing I wanted to mention about Viridian software, you might recognize the name because it's the engine behind the genealogy newspaper website, Ella find.com that was a very popular website several years ago. It was kind of geared to genealogy research. It was all about newspapers, and it was free. The problem was it closed its doors a couple of years ago. Well, good news. Viridian Software just announced that Elefine.com is coming back. Yes, I said it's coming back and that's a really good thing. That was a terrific website. Again, geared to genealogy research for newspapers, completely free. And with this comeback, they are going to be not only having keyword search, but they are going to be incorporating the newest technology with artificial intelligence to help you with semantic searches as well. So keep an eye on elephant.com. if you head to elephine.com you can sign up and get announcements sent to you when the site is back. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Hope you're excited to go check out these new collections. And as always, you're going to find links to this website, to the projects page, to the newspaper collections all over at the podcast show notes page. And that is@familytreemagazine.com podcast. Also, while you're at the website, I would encourage you to sign up for our free email newsletter. It's the perfect way to stay in touch with everything we've got going on at Family Tree magazine, including our other podcast, the Family Tree Magazine Podcast. I'm Lisa Louise Cook. And you can find me at my website, genealogy gems.com, where you'll find links to my Genealogy Gems podcast and our YouTube channel. Until next time, have fun climbing your family tree.