It was more affordable. That was the comment during Tuesday evening’s hybrid meeting of Durham Branch of OGS when the host site for local digitized newspapers was mentioned.
Canadian Community Digital Archives aims to provide very high-quality images, with no compromise in image fidelity, in a simple and cost-effective way for Libraries, Historical Societies and other community based orginizations to share their historical content online.
The site presently hosts 169,558 pages of newspapers, clippings and photographs.
There are 33 newspaper titles for Bracebridge, Brampton, Comwall, Goderich, Hanover, Huntsville, Newmarket, Oshawa, Port Hope, Sudbury, and Uxbridge.
All are OCR’d and hits are highlighted on the image of the original, not always easy to spot.
The standouts in the collection are:
The Huntsville Forrester with 104,224 pages from 1895 to 2018,
Bracebridge Gazette with 13,902 pages from 1903 to 1955, Bracebridge Herald Gazette with 19,624 pages from 1955 to 1986
Muskoka Herald with 15,754 pages from 1888 to 1955.
The site provides a repository for small newspaper collections, 14 having fewer than 100 pages.
It’s a great collection – I have referred researchers here in BC to it 🙂
I find the collection good but the site slow. Once you type in your search word the system does not come back and tell you how many hits were found but displays all the newspapers to look in. Out of the four newspapers I checked, the term was not highlighted even though the box was checked, and only in one paper did I find the term at all, and that was purely by accident. More fine tuning needs to be done. I hope they are working on that.