Papers Past

I wanted to pass along this great resource I discovered while doing research early this morning. Called “Papers Past,” it is a scanned digital archive of many pre-1920 newspapers from New Zealand. While located about as far away from Florida as one could be in a geographical sense, these papers offer excellent coverage of late nineteenth century events throughout the United States and Florida (such as the Spanish-American War and its effect on Tampa).

Here’s the link:

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=p&p=home&e=-------10--1----0-all

Some newspapers are fully searchable; others may be browsed but have not yet been scanned with OCR that would allow full-text searching. What makes this collection so amazing is that it covers a substantial portion of the mid- and late-nineteenth century (from 1839 to 1920), provides free access, and allows for the easy saving of digitized “clippings” (just right-click!). It complements the Times of London and historical New York Times. The other nice thing—similar to many of the old county newspapers from throughout the United States before the 1920s—is that it includes excerpts borrowed by NZ papers from other publications that have never been microfilmed or digitized and thus no longer exist in their original form.