We have 5,000 issues of newspapers dating from 1860 - 1923. Because they are poor scans of old microfilm, we get lousy searching results from the built-in search tool in Adobe Acrobat (our images are PDF). There's way too many images for our staff to tackle - so I'd like to create a database the community at large can use to help index this collection. Example: I was clicking through the collection one day and came upon a great local account of the dedication of Grant's Tomb. A local reporter went to the event and wrote a fascinating article. If I had the opportunity to index that article on that page of that newspaper - I would have.

I have a Google search tool - but produces poor results. I know I can never index all the great stories in 5,000 papers - but the community at large or interested historical societies could. Maybe one day. I'm very interested in minimum metadata fields that won't overwhelm the casual, untrained, indexer. Check it out at: