Newspaperarchive
Encyclopedia
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Cedar Rapids is the second largest city in Iowa and is the county seat of Linn County. The city lies on both banks of the Cedar River, north of Iowa City and east of Des Moines, the state's capital and largest city...
. NewspaperArchive.com states that it is the largest online historical newspaper database.
NewspaperArchive.com said it provided full text search for 909 million articles on 85 million pages over 240 years that represented 2,875 publication titles in more than 748 cities.
Searches can be conducted by keyword, date, and location. Results are free, but access to the newspaper articles available to download in PDF format
Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
requires a subscription. Searching is available directly from newspaperarchive.com or via news.google.com/archivesearch. The company says that it follows the Automated Content Access Protocol
Automated Content Access Protocol
Automated Content Access Protocol was proposed in 2006 as a method of providing machine-readable permissions information for content, in the hope that it would have allowed automated processes to be compliant with publishers' policies without the need for human interpretation of legal terms...
in which its clients have a say in what is available online.
The digitized newspapers that are currently available and OCR
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
'd represent a fraction of the 150 million pages of historical documents that Heritage Microfilm maintains in its microform archive. According to NewspaperArchive.com, it is microfilming 2.5 million pages of newspapers each month and has 180,000 reels of microfilm.
The website was brought down for two days in June 2008 by the Iowa Flood of 2008
Iowa flood of 2008
The Iowa flood of 2008 was a hydrological event involving most of the rivers in eastern Iowa beginning around June 8, 2008 and ending about July 1. Flooding continued on the Upper Mississippi River in the southeastern portion of the state for several more days...
which cut power to its data center in Cedar Rapids. The company said that its physical archives, which are stored on higher ground, were not damaged.