Mar 17, 2010

Chronicling America API

For my individual iteration 2 I am am using the Chronicling America API. This API gives information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. It is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC).

The site allows you to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. To encourage a wide range of potential uses, they designed several different views of the data which are publicly visible and do not require an API key to use them.

This API allows you to:
  • Search - the newspaper directory and digitized page contents using OpenSearch.
  • Link - using stable URL pattern for titles, issues, editions, and pages.
  • Linked Data - views of information about titles, batches, issues, and pages in RDF/XML.
  • Aggregations - of items, like all the pages that make one issue, are related using OAI-ORE
Compared to the old methods of looking up newspaper pages, this is a convinient way to view historic data. Here is an example of a newspaper page:

4 comments:

  1. This sounds like a really cool API. It is easy to forget that newspapers used to be the only way that information got to people. Now with The Internet and TV newspapers are probably going to be a thing of the past as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow Helen you always have good ideas. I think this would be useful for reseach I definitlty would use it for research on old newspapers articles.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Helen is what I like to call the API-Master. This is a specific title I coined just for her. As for this API specifically, I find it rather humorous that newspapers are finally catching up to the web, as Leticia pointed out how newspapers used to be the prime resource of local information.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great post helen and very cool api. That is really one of the most interesting api's that I have seen since we began this class and I think I might try to tie that into our group project somehow.

    ReplyDelete