One of America’s oldest news organizations focusing on the African-American community, The AFRO-American Newspapers, has announced the finalization of a long-term deal with Google.
Under the partnership, a comprehensive collection of?more than a million?AFRO-American Newspapers articles have been digitized and are now?available via online searches. The compilation took more than 10 years in the making; but now the historical articles, covering everything from the Civil Rights Movement to the entertainment world, is now accessible to all.
“We partnered with AFRO-American Newspapers years ago to digitize and host their archives in Google News Archives,” explains spokesperson Jeannie Hornung. “You can explore their archives?here. For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint — from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.”
Besides just reading past articles, according to the AFRO-American Newspapers, the collection can be used by researchers, students, historians, teachers, and others?to trace family roots as well as learn more about the issues that affected African-Americans throughout the years.
“News archive searches provide an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time,” Hornung points out. “In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can also see a historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically generated timeline. Search results include content from a number of sources, including both partner content digitized by Google through our?News Archive Partner Program?(as with Afro-American Newspapers)?and online archival materials that we’ve crawled.”
Headquartered in Baltimore, AFRO-American Newspapers is oldest African-American family owned newspaper in the country. It was founded in 1892 by John H. Murphy, Sr., and now publishes three editions (Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Prince George’s County Maryland). It also publishes the online Afro.com. In all,?the AFRO has more than 500,000 readers. The organization additionally supports several community outreach programs, such as Mrs. Santa, Clean Green Block and Character Education.
The paper also has a new mobile iPhone application in which the AFRO’s Archives can be accessed instantly via mobile phones. To access the AFRO-American Newspaper Archives on-line, visit http://www.afro.com/afroblackhistoryarchives<… <http://www.afro.com/afroblackhistoryarchives> .
