Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection facts for kids
The Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection is an amazing online archive where you can explore old newspapers from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's like a giant digital library filled with news stories, advertisements, and articles from the past. You can search through more than 650,000 articles for free!
Contents
What is the Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection?
This special collection is a huge online library of old newspapers from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's completely free to use and lets you search for specific words or topics, just like you would on a modern search engine. The newspapers in this collection are so old that they are in the public domain. This means their copyright has expired, and anyone can freely use, share, and read them without needing special permission.
Who Created This Collection?
The Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection was created by the Cambridge Room, which is the Archives and Special Collections department of the Cambridge Public Library. Think of it as the library's special section dedicated to preserving and sharing local history. This important project also received support and funding from something called the Community Preservation Act. This act helps communities in Massachusetts save historic places, create parks, and build affordable housing. In this case, it helped bring these old newspapers to life online!
How Does the Collection Work?
To make these old newspapers available online, they go through a special process. First, the physical newspapers are carefully scanned, turning each page into a digital image. After scanning, a technology called OCR (which stands for Optical Character Recognition) is used. OCR software looks at the scanned images of the newspaper pages and tries to "read" the text, turning it into searchable computer text.
This means you can do two cool things:
- You can see the actual image of the old newspaper page, just as it looked when it was printed.
- You can also search the text that the OCR software created. This makes it super easy to find articles about specific people, events, or places. Sometimes, the OCR isn't perfect because old newspapers can be hard to read, but it's still a powerful tool for exploring history!
Newspapers You Can Explore
The Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection includes four important newspapers from Cambridge's past. Each one offers a unique look into daily life, local news, and major events from different time periods. You can read articles from:
- Cambridge Chronicle (from 1846 to 1923)
- Cambridge Press (from 1887 to 1889)
- Cambridge Sentinel (from 1903 to 1912)
- Cambridge Tribune (from 1887 to 1923)
These newspapers are a fantastic resource for school projects, learning about your local history, or just discovering what life was like in Cambridge over a hundred years ago!
