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.
- Newspapers on microfilm. (We are only scanning from microfilm at the present time.)
- Good quality microfilm. If the film is too scratched, it can’t be used.
- Newspapers in the public domain (prior to 1922), unless we have written permission from the publisher. If any post-1922 newspapers are to be considered, RRLC will need help from the owning repository in tracking down and obtaining permission from the publisher. RRLC has a standard letter that can be used.
- Long and complete runs of newspapers are preferred over scattered issues or short runs. (Weekly newspapers preferred since we can cover more years that way.)
- We would like to ensure newspapers from all RRLC area counties are eventually included.
- Scope of the newspaper.
- Ability of the owning library/institution to handle incidentals like shipping costs, etc.
- Financial support from the library/organization is helpful and may be considered in establishing priority.