Historical Newspapers of the Rochester, New York Region provides indexed access to selected historical newspapers from the
service area of the Rochester Regional Library Council: Livingston, Monroe,
Ontario, Wayne and Wyoming counties.
The images on the website were
scanned and processed by an optical character recognition program and converted
to PDF files. The contents of these PDF files were then indexed and placed on
the web.
This project began in 2010 as a pilot project in partnership with the Fairport Public Library with the
posting of historical newspapers from the Fairport, NY area.
The selection of titles to be included
in this project is limited by the availability of the title on microfilm and by
the quality of the microfilmed image. Unfortunately, many microfilmed images
are of too poor a quality to be successfully scanned.
Rochester New York Region Historical
Newspapers is made available through a partnership with the Northern New York Library Network. We are grateful for
their assistance.
Partial funding for this project is
from the New York State Education Department, Division of Library Development,
through its Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resource Sharing
Program.
Additional New York State newspaper titles and the repositories which house them can be found through a listing at the New York State Library.
RRLC area libraries owning microfilm runs of their local newspapers and interested in having these added to Historical Newspapers of the Rochester, New York Region, should contact RRLC (email rrlc@rrlc.org; phone 585-223-7570).
Guidelines for Selection of Newspapers for the Historical Newspapers in the Rochester, NY Region
These factors are considered in the selection of newspapers for digitization.
Required criteria:
- Newspapers that are in the public domain (prior to 1923) or have written permission (form provided by RRLC) from the publisher if they are under copyright
- Well-preserved microfilm (not excessively scratched, legible on a film reader)
- Ability of the owning institution to be without film during the digitization process
- Funding availability from RRLC RBDB grant, if owning institution is unable to provide financial support*
Preferred criteria:
- Complete runs of newspapers preferred:
- Missing 20% or less of date range
- Long range of newspapers over shorter range:
- At least 5 concurrent years
- Financial support from owning institution to cover various associated costs*:
- Digitization of reels (approximately $.10/ newspaper page)
- Shipping
- Storage/backup (hardware)
- Scope of paper (usability/importance to area)
- Equal representation of newspapers from the five-county Rochester region: Livingston, Monroe, Ontario, Wayne and Wyoming counties
*Institutions that are able to provide financial support may be given priority. The potential for digitization of newspapers by libraries that are unable to provide financial support is dependent upon the state of RRLC’s allotted funds at the time an institution approaches RRLC, as well as the percentage of any remaining allotted funds the digitization requires.