More than once here at FGI we have lamented the fact that newspapers have not used the web to link to documents (of all kinds, not just government publications) that they cite. The New York Times is doing a better job of this than most.

I recently realized that they even have a server named documents.nytimes.com. I noticed this when following a story (Army History Finds Early Missteps in Afghanistan, By James Dao, December 30, 2009) about a new, unpublished Army history of the war in Afghanistan.

The report, "A Different Kind of War," was "written by a team of seven historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and based on open source material, it is scheduled to be published by spring." The Times posted the document online http://documents.nytimes.com/a-different-kind-of-war#p=1 , but not as a PDF or other downloadable format, but as a series of page-images. I would certainly prefer to see the option of downloading the entire document and can't see why the Times didn't provide that option. (There are no ads on the pages I viewed, so it isn't a matter of forcing you to view an ad for every page you read.) Presumably the published version will be available for downloading and preservation, but it would be better if this version was also available for downloading and preservation. That would make it easier for scholars to use now and easier to compare changes when the final version is released.

I also noticed that, if you go to the root web directory of the Times documents web site (http://documents.nytimes.com) you are redirected to http://documents.nytimes.com/atom which is an RSS (actually "atom" -- a similar format) feed of documents posted. That is excellent!

In an investigation on how the Bush administration uses retired military officers to promote its message on the Iraq war, the New York Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantanamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

The story based on these documents (Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand By David Barstow, New York Times, April 20, 2008) is supplemented online by "Audio, video and documents that show how the military’s talking points were disseminated" (How the Pentagon Spread Its Message and a "Document Archive," which allows users to read and download documents and parts of documents. Of the 8000 pages, only a few are available online, but these include emails, a "Talking Points Memo," excerpts from a Transcript of meeting with Mr. Rumsfeld, and a Pentagon document that reports "Monitoring of Analysts."

Together, the audio-visual presentation and the documents are a small model for how newspapers could be using the power of the web to enhance their coverage and utility. I would certainly like to see all 8000 pages online!

The story itself is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of the daily news.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions."

...Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

Over on our ResourceShelf.com site we've recently posted on several newspaper and book digitization projects.

Here's info (and of course, links) to a couple of them.

New today (official launch tomorrow night) is the debut of the Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers database and directory from the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities. The project (beta release) includes over 260,000 digitized newspaper pages and a nicely structured and searchable directory of newspaper info back to 1790.

Newspapers in the public domain from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910 are part of the database. More content to come. You can also find information about specific newspapers back to 1690.

Next, we are happy to report that it's once again easy (no registration required) to access the FREE "special collections" from NewspaperARCHIVE.com.

These collections contain the full text and full images of thousands of digitized newspaper pages. Delivered as PDF files.

Not only keyword searchable but many collections offer browsable timelines. Btw, full text access to a large portion of the entire NewspaperARCHIVE database (over 60 million pages) remains available to K-12 schools and public libraries at NO CHARGE.

More here!

Btw, the current list of free special collections includes the following topics:

+ Abraham Lincoln
+ AIDS
+ Asbestos
+ Chocolate Wars
Content Coming Soon.
+ Earthquakes
+ FBI
+ Global Warming
+ Holocaust
+ Immigration
+ Kennedy Assassination
+ Martin Luther King, Jr.
+ Outlaw
+ Pro Baseball
+ Ronald Reagan
+ San Antonio, Texas
+ September 11
+ Space Program
+ Target America
+ Hurricanes
+ Pearl Harbor
+ Terrorism
+ Titanic
+ Tornado
+ Winter Games