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kottke.org posts about Tom Tryniski

The man who digitizes newspapers

For more than a decade, retired engineer Tom Tryniski has been digitizing old newspapers from microfilm and making their full text available and searchable online.

Tryniski’s site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress’ historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page. In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.

(via @ftrain)