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There are some weird things going on at the Old Fulton NY Post Cards site. First off, despite the name, it has nothing to do with old postcards from the Empire State. Second, it's full of strange animations. A goldfish floats around the screen, squirrels snack on corn on a string, and there's a head with spider legs that crawls about. There are sounds (such as a cannon and fireworks) that play at random moments, and you can't turn them off.
But these strange oddities are just the wrapping around the true content of the site, which is 22 million pages of scanned, fully searchable pages of old New York state newspapers. All completely free. There aren't even any ads. If you like doing historical research, it's a goldmine. The site has been around for a while, but many have just discovered it and the facts about the site, which may surprise you
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Tom Tryniski, minus the third eye and spider legs, runs the site off of servers in his home. Tryniski has managed to put together an online newspaper archive that's larger than the Library of Congress's newspaper archive. Much larger, far more comprehensive, and at a far cheaper price. It's been his labor of love.
Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath in digitally archiving newspapers. The Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages (17 million less that Tryniski's)on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page. In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages twice what the well-funded LOC site received.
Fourteen years ago, Tryniski, a retired engineer, launched his website after a friend loaned him a collection of old postcards of Fulton, New York, the town where he's lived all his life. He decided to scan and share them online with his neighbors. After the postcards, he digitized the entire run of the Oswego Valley News, which is the paper of record for Fulton and its surrounding county. It took about a year to finish scanning by hand the entire run of the paper, which began publishing in 1946.
He really got going in 2003, when he bought a scanner for $3500 at a fire sale that handles microfilm. That meant he didn't need access to the original newspaper copies and he could work quickly because microfilm scanners are largely automated. He installed a keyword recognition program, set up a network of PCs to do the heavy processing, and began uploading his scans to a server that's located in a gazebo on his front deck. He never bothered to change the original name of his website
Tryniski pays all expenses for the site himself. The only significant costs are bandwidth, for which he pays $630 per month, and hard drives, which run him about $200 per month. He gets his microfilm at no cost from small libraries and historical societies. In exchange, he gives them a copy of all the scanned images analyzed for keyword recognition. Most of the papers he has digitized are from New York, but he’s rapidly expanding his coverage to other states as well. He is adding new content at a rate of about a quarter-million pages per month with no plans to slow down.
Chronicling America, the Library of Congress site, is financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). To date, the NEH has spent just over $22 million on the site. A major reason for the sky-high price tag is that the NEH breaks up the money into tiny grants to individual libraries and historical societies, instead of simply paying the Library of Congress directly to complete the job. So far, the NEH has awarded 72 grants worth about $300,000 each. Each award recipient is responsible for digitizing about 100,000 newspaper pages. The majority of grant recipients hire a company called iArchives, Inc., a subsidiary of Ancestry.com, to do the actual scanning and analysis.
Asked for the rationale behind this byzantine system, a spokesperson for the NEH denied that breaking up the funding into small grants drives up costs, adding that the goal is partially to teach small libraries how to digitize newspapers in accordance with the Library of Congress' "high technical" standards. That way they’ll be able to take that know-how and apply it to other projects.
Less than one-third of the funding goes to the actual scanning and indexing by firms like iArchives. The NEH says the remaining money—more than $2 per newspaper page— goes for "identification and selection of the files to be digitized, metadata creation, cataloguing, reviewing files for quality control, and scholarship on the scope, content and significance on each digitized newspaper title, and in some cases specialized language expertise."
Likewise, the Brooklyn Public Library spent two years and about $400,000 dollars digitizing just the first 62 years of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's run, which comes to about 150,000 pages. That was back in 2003. For the last decade, the library has been trying to raise money to finish the job.
In the meantime, Tom Tryniski digitized the entire 115-year run of the newspaper, which amounts to almost 750,000 pages, and offers it free to all, absorbing the cost. Though he doesn't even write an article, he is probably the most prolific newspaperman out there. At no cost to you. God bless Tom Tryniski and all the other on-line journalists that do it for the good of all, and not the money.
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