COLLABORATION
Searching 1925 should be as easy as searching 2025.
Your back issues are already scanned. A reader can turn the pages and find almost nothing. We turn those same files into stories that can be searched, linked and read — and hand them back to you.
Want even better search?
A scan is a starting point. Misread words and articles split across columns can keep useful results out of reach.
Partnerships with publishers, libraries, archives, and local history organizations can help us improve text recognition, join article fragments, and make names and places easier to find. Readers can still check the original scan.
Have an archive or a collection you would like to make easier to search? Explore the examples and partnership options below.
The same page, four ways
The Highland Recorder of Monterey, Virginia, 26 January 1894 — still published today as The Recorder. Follow it from a photograph of a page to something a reader can actually use.
See it where it lives now
A photograph of a broadsheet, with a wall of machine-read text behind it and no idea where one story ends and the next begins. Search a family name and you get a page, somewhere on which it may appear.
The broadsheet at the Library of Congress →
Virginia Chronicle, where Virginia's papers live →
See it as the machine does
Textsheet — our term — puts the page in its columns and shows every box of text the scanner handed back, where it was printed. Not stories yet: just boxes, and visible mistakes. “ncome Tax Bnlletio” for Income Tax Bulletin.
See it as stories
Boxes joined back into articles, across columns and pages, each with its headline and date, and the original scan one click away. This is where the work is, and where it is still improving.
See it on your own website
The last step is the point. The articles, the cleaned text and the names go back to you, so your archive search covers 1925 the way it covers 2025 — on your site, under your name, with the traffic and the subscriptions that follow.
That is what we are raising money to finish.
Find your own paper
63 Virginia papers that still publish today already have their back issues on Virginia Chronicle. Nothing new needs to be scanned for any of them. Look at yours as it stands now:
What we have built
We hold a complete copy of the Library of Congress's newspaper collection, so this work runs on our own machines rather than waiting on anyone's download limits. On top of it:
- We read the files a digitization already produced — the scan, and the position data recording every box of text with its coordinates.
- We work out the page's own structure: its columns, which boxes belong to which, and the order a reader would follow.
- We join boxes into stories, across columns and across pages. This is the hard part, and where most of the work goes.
- We read the page again with modern models where the old text is too damaged to use. The printed page stays the record; the new reading is a separate, marked layer.
- We score the text, so "the OCR is bad" becomes a number per page rather than an opinion.
- We index the people named, which is what a family historian actually arrives with.
Every paper on this site came through that pipeline. Some are fully grouped into stories; others are still read as loose blocks, and each paper says which.
What we want to do next
- Grouping that holds up across a century of layouts, not only clean issues — stories that jump pages, and department columns where a dozen items share one heading.
- Advertising separated from news across a full run, which turns a century of local commerce into its own record.
- A name index worth trusting, with the same person recognized across decades and spellings.
- Hand-back: the improved text and the article boundaries delivered into your archive, so your existing search gets better rather than being replaced.
- Whole papers, many of them — the Virginia titles still publishing whose back issues already sit at the Library of Virginia, and the state collections beyond.
That is what grant funding buys: the processing itself, the machines to run it on, and the engineering that makes it repeatable for the next paper rather than heroic for this one.
If you publish a newspaper
You keep everything. Link to the public archive, run it on your own site, or both.
How the files get to us
- You ask the library or archive holding your digitized back issues to release your paper's files.
- They instruct the vendor who produced those files.
- We hand the vendor a storage bucket and they copy the paper into it. No disks, nothing for the library to host.
- We process the whole title. A hundred pages takes the same setup as twenty thousand, so there is no reason to do it twice.
This has been done once already, for the Rappahannock News: the publisher asked, the Library of Virginia instructed the vendor, and the paper's complete digitization arrived.
Virginia
We are preparing grant applications this autumn to do this work for Virginia papers, as the Museado Foundation, a Virginia nonprofit. What makes that case is publishers saying they want it.
If that is your paper, a short letter of support is the most useful thing you can send. Write to tac@museado.org or call 202-656-7822 and we will send a one-page version to sign.
Paid work
Send us your newspaper and we return it as articles, as well as the material allows. Older microfilm and worn type are harder than clean scans, and we say so rather than pretending otherwise.
The same applies to photograph collections, oral histories and scanned documents: capture, transcription, description and search, handed back in open formats.
For pricing, write to tac@museado.org or call 202-656-7822.
Beyond Virginia
The Library of Congress's Chronicling America carries tens of millions of newspaper pages from every state, free for anyone to use. Our complete copy of its bulk collection is why the papers on this site could be built without asking anyone's permission.
Virginia Chronicle is not unusual. Most states run something similar — Utah Digital Newspapers, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, Hoosier State Chronicles in Indiana, the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Georgia Historic Newspapers, Oregon Historic Newspapers, Montana Newspapers, and others. The same work applies to all of them, and in most cases the scans and position data already exist.
If you run one of those programs, or a paper whose archive sits in one: tac@museado.org · 202-656-7822.