Teachers: Welcome to this instructional website. It has been designed for middle school-aged students to use to understand a great new service from the Library of Congress and The National Endowment for the Humanities. There is one prepared database activity and on additional project, you can find them on the PROJECTS page with the downloadable FOLLOW ALONG ACTIVITY

Scope: There are two information services provided by Chronicling America. Users can find information about newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present in the Chronicling America Directory labeled "FIND" and they can view newspaper pages from 1880 to 1910 from the following states: California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia under "VIEW". This website deals with the latter, or "View" service.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers is in a BETA phase. That means it is incomplete in its range of coverage. Each year a grant is given to several facilities nationwide to continue adding material to the database. The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a partnership between the NEH and the Library of Congress to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers. Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet.

What is OCR?
Optical character recognition (OCR) is a fully automated process that converts the visual image of numbers and letters into computer-readable numbers and letters. Computer software can then search the OCR-generated text for words, phrases, numbers, or other characters. However, OCR is not 100 percent accurate, and, particularly if the original item has extraneous markings on the page, unusual text styles, or very small fonts, the searchable text OCR generates will contain errors that cannot be corrected by automated means.Although errors in the process are unavoidable, OCR is still a powerful tool for making text-based items accessible to searching. For example, important concept words often appear more than once within an article. Therefore, if OCR misreads one instance of a key word in a passage, but correctly reads the second instance, the passage will still be found in a full-text search.