Sunday, February 28, 2016

St. Louis Post Dispatch Archives Searchable Back to 1874

A week ago, the St. Louis Post Dispatch announced that their archives back to 1874 were now searchable. They are being hosted by Newspapers.com. (It's not part of the Newspapers.com Basic subscription you receive through Ancestry's "All Access" pass. It has to be purchased separately, or through their Publishers+ subscription, which allows you access to other newspaper archives they are hosting.)

I was previously able to access 1874-1922 and 1988-current through ProQuest databases at St. Louis County Library, and my library card. However, this opened 66 additional years of articles. All of my paternal second great grandparents arrived in St. Louis between 1880 and 1910, and my maternal grandparents arrived in the 1920s, so this opened a potential goldmine. Additionally, no digital search yields complete results due to fading newsprint. I have already found at least one pre-1922 article on the Newspapers.com database that hadn't turned up in my ProQuest searches. (The article is in the ProQuest archive; using a different search term I have retrieved it.)

Can I share here the post-1922 articles that I find?

Everything pre-1923 is in the public domain. With more recent material, one needs permission from the source. Here's what the St. Louis Post Dispatch now says on their archives page:

"You can save or print clippings or entire pages and share what you find on social media."

Despite all my years of education, I am going to interpret 'can' to mean 'may.' This appears to be a blanket permission statement, as long as one keeps it to social media, which should include personal blogs like my own. [However, I am not going to apply the permission to articles from the Associated Press or other syndicates. I fully realize the Post Dispatch doesn't have the authority to grant permission for those. They aren't the source of the articles. I have previously requested permission from the AP on some news stories, and found their fees to be too high for my liking. Fortunately, it is the local stories that I am most interested in.]

Note: They are advertising that the dates available are up to 30 days ago. Currently, I can only find articles up through 2003. That will hopefully change. However, I still have access to current articles through the St. Louis County Library ProQuest database.

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