web5design / chronam

A project of the Library of Congress. Note: project members work on both official Library of Congress projects and non-LC projects. Project mailing list can be found at http://listserv.loc.gov/archives/chronam-users.html.

chronam

chronam is the Django application that the Library of Congress uses to make its Chronicling America website. The Chronicling America website makes millions of pages of historic American newspapers that have been digitized by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) browsable and searchable on the Web. A little bit of background is needed to understand why this software is being made available.

NDNP is actually a partnership between the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and cultural heritage organizations (awardees) across the United States who have applied for grants to help digitize newspapers in their state. Awardees digitize newspaper microfilm according to a set of specifications and then ship the data back to the Library of Congress where it is loaded into Chronicling America.

Awardee institutions are able to use this data however they want, including creating their own websites that highlight their newspaper content in the local context of their own collections. The idea of making chronam available here on Github is to provide a technical option to these awardees, or other interested parties who want to make their own websites of NDNP newspaper content available. chronam provides a core set of functionality for loading, modeling and indexing NDNP data, while allowing you to customize the look and feel of the website to suit the needs of your organization.

The NDNP data is in the Public Domain and is itself [available] (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/) on the Web for anyone to use. The hope is that the chronam software can be useful for others who want to work with and/or publish the content.

Install

To learn more about how to install the software see operating specific instructions:

• install_ubuntu.txt
• install_redhat.txt

Get Data

As mentioned above, the NDNP data that awardees create and ship to the Library of Congress is in the public domain and is made available on the Web as batches. Each batch contains newsaper issues for one or more newspaper titles. To use chronam you will need to have some of this batch data to load. If you are an awardee you probably have this data on hand already, but if not you can use a tool like wget to bulk download the batches. For example

wget --recursive --no-host-directories --cut-dirs 1 --include-directories /data/batches/batch_dlc_jamaica_ver01/ http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/batch_dlc_jamaica_ver01/

License

This software is in the Public Domain.