Chronicling America Video Resources

I recently completed an article for publication in the Seattle Genealogical Society’s semi-annual Bulletin, introducing the Chronicling America historic newspaper website. Space constraints prevented the inclusion of additional resources which may be of use to genealogical researchers.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Ohio Historical Society (OHS), one of the participating state partners in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), have each released short videos about the Chronicling America project. Both groups have YouTube channels, but it may be easier to begin your search elsewhere.

In 2013, NEH released two brief videos, one an overview of Chronicling America, and one on how to clip and save content from the site. Both of these videos can be accessed via the EDSITEment! Chronicling America portal, aimed at educators and students. Additional content is promised.

EDSITEment Chronicling America pagehttp://edsitement.neh.gov/what-chronicling-america

The Ohio Historical Society released a series of eleven video podcasts in early 2012, addressing a variety of topics on using the Chronicling America website. Basic search and navigation are included, of course, but other videos cover topics such as advanced searches, optical character recognition technology (OCR) and “controlled vocabulary”. I highly recommend watching all of them. The Chronicling America website was revised earlier this month so the images from the video series will differ somewhat from what you see on the Chronicling America website today.

http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ondp/index.php?title=Podcasts

Alternately, download a PDF file with links to video content on YouTube from the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) here.

In addition to the links to the OHS YouTube videos, a lot more content regarding the Ohio NDNP program can be accessed from the main page of their wiki. Do not miss this if you are interested in historic Ohio newspapers!