NETWORK ADDS MILLIONTH PAGE

POTSDAM — The Northern New York Library Network recently added its millionth page to its historical newspapers Web site, when a page of the former Potsdam Courier-Freeman was scanned into the online archive.

Just three years after its founding, the Northern New York Historical Newspapers Web site now has 1,004,000 pages available from 28 newspapers in seven counties.

The site also has been redesigned to feature a map so researchers can narrow their search by county.

"This has been a real help to researchers. It has done a lot to reveal the unique history of the north country to researchers around the world," said John J. Hammond, NNYLN executive director. "It's great for people looking at their hometown paper, for researchers and for family historians looking for relatives. It's a really positive thing."

The millionth page was among 84,000 pages added from the former Potsdam Courier-Freeman, published from 1861 to 1989. Its addition was supported by the Friends of the Potsdam Public Museum, which helped finance the microfilming of issues from 1946 to the mid-1980s.

Since the Potsdam publication was added, more than 24,000 searches have been conducted on the online Courier-Freeman archive, said Thomas J. Blauvelt, library network systems administrator.

To preserve the newspapers online, the library network's digital technician, Agnes A. Hoey, must scan each page from microfilm and run the image through an optical character recognition program, which indexes the page so researchers can search for words, names or phrases.

The Web site allows people to search and browse images of newspaper pages as they appeared in print.

"You can actually read the paper as it was. You can see it in the context of the day, with the design and advertisements," he said.

In addition to making the newspaper archives widely accessible, the Web site also requires very little cost to maintain once pages are loaded.

The library network next plans to add the Tupper Lake Free Press and the Massena Observer to the historical site.

"It is being used by people with a wide range of interests. The technology is not perfect, but it does allow us to provide greatly increased access to these newspapers," Mr. Blauvelt said in a statement. "The libraries of the region have been very cooperative in sharing their collections. We have also had excellent cooperation from the owners and publishers of the newspapers now on the site; they all appreciate the value of the historical records their companies have created and they have been generous in allowing us to share them with everyone."