Freedom digital archiving project

[Rob Ray]

Might be of interest to a few folks round here, we've been collating/digitising some of our archives of Freedom anarchist newspaper over the last few months and have now got well over 500 issues online (I reckon around a fifth of the total, give or take) — though it's a bit of a random assortment in places. It's navigable by decade and most of what's there is machine readable (ie. you can copy-paste direct from the relevant PDF).

Quality varies, as it's being done by a mix of collating whatever's already online, some proper scanning and some just being photos taken page by page (especially with the larger/more fragile stuff). Anyway enjoy (if it's your sort of bag ):

The Freedom Press Newspaper Archive

 

[Rob Ray]

Quick update: A further 278 issues have been uploaded in the last month, including but not limited to:

1906-1916, mostly full sets
1936-39 (when what was to become the new collective was producing Spain and the World/Revolt in support of the CNT-FAI)
1960-61, mostly full sets
1970s, assorted
2000s, assorted

Bringing us to 817 issues since October, approx 200 a month. There's still a chunk of 60s, 70s and 2010s stuff which will be easily scannable in Freedom's physical archive, so plenty left to do, but that'll be most of the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. Getting hold of 1890s/1940s stuff in particular may require some sort of grab from a major archive.

 

[imposs1904]

Is the archive searchable?

 

[Rob Ray]

Not as in googling, but if you know the approx date the PDFs have mostly been OCR'd so can be searched individually.

 

[Rob Ray]

Edit: Google's now caught up with a fair number of the pdfs, so searches such as this are (not entirely reliably) bringing up results imposs1904.

Also 1900 and most of 1966/67 are now up, and I've done a more in-depth bloggy piece on the process over at libcom.

 

[chilango]

Good work

 

[LDC]

Yeah, great project and effort, thanks to those doing it.

 

[Rob Ray]

Just passed 1,000 issues!