A visit with the man who has digitized more newspaper pages than the Library of Congress.

Harper's Magazine ^ | September 13, 2017 | Jesse Coburn

[RubyR]

Tom Tryniski isn’t trained as an archivist. Nor does he have ties to any institution or receive much compensation for the many hours he’s spent scanning the microform of local newspapers he orders from libraries. Still, he is devoted to the endeavor. Since his retirement in 1999, he has digitized some forty million newspaper pages and posted them to his website, fultonhistory.com. His collection, at three times the size of the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive, is in all likelihood the largest free repository of its kind.

But there is more work to be done, Tryniski says. “Do you have any idea how many rolls of microfilm the state of New York has?” the sixty-eight-year-old asked on a Wednesday afternoon in November, his face illuminated by two massive computer screens. He was sitting in his living room in Fulton, New York, a declining industrial town twenty-three miles north of Syracuse. “I’m going to guess 50 million.”

And that’s only counting New York. Tryniski’s archival ambitions well exceed the borders of the state where he has lived his entire life. Fultonhistory.com already contains more than a thousand newspaper titles from across the United States and Canada. But Tryniski knows that his efforts thus far have barely scratched the surface of our vast printed history. U.S. libraries alone contain more than 154,000 U.S. newspaper titles, according to a directory maintained by the Library of Congress. So Tryniski spent that afternoon, the day after Donald Trump was elected president, doing what he has done every day for the past eighteen years: sitting in his living room, tending to his website.

Tryniski is a slight man with a thin covering of white hair. His life is dictated by strict routine, including his daily uniform of T-shirts, blue jeans...

[RubyR]

This website has been invaluable to me. I never knew the man behind it until now.

Also some interesting political perspective within this article.

[PghBaldy]

I have used it over much, not so much now after my computers died, though have trouble searching.

[4yearlurker]

Cant get to his website. Firefox says can't connect might be to busy.

[ml/nj]

self ping

[goodnesswins]

"Hillary Clinton visited Mimi’s during her 2000 Senate campaign, but Tryniski didn’t go. He voted for Trump in 2016, after previously supporting Obama, like many of his neighbors. In 2008, Obama received 50 percent of votes in Oswego County, where Fulton is located. In 2016, Clinton won less than 36 percent."

Interesting in regard to newspapers..I found out who murdered my great grandfather by visiting a museum in Sidney, MT...they had actual newspapers from 1943...

[NewJerseyJoe]

P4L

[TomGuy]

Too much traffic. We broke it, apparently.

[Bshaw]

Ping for later.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks RubyR. Interesting, modern history ping.

[zeugma]

Sadly, with our perpetual copyright, the vast majority of this work is illegal. At any time, the NYT or other purveyors of fake news could demand he remove all of their data from his archive, or sue him for copyright infringement. Modern copyright terms are insane.

[ADemocratNoMore]

Hi. You might be interested in this.

[mairdie]

Thank you! I’ve definitely used that site. Love hearing about volunteers accomplishing good things.

There’s a new art video of Academy artists up at:
https://youtu.be/xpAw8Ux5iW0

Best, M

[logician2u]

Not only printed matter, but music--both recorded and as written out--is "protected" by the various US copyright laws until most of us are in the grave.

We can give full credit for that to Irving Berlin and a Democrat congress (not that Republicans didn't also go along with the grift).

If Trump truly wants to "make America great" a drastic overhaul of the copyright law, if done right, might be a good first step. Making copyright law user-friendly rather than antagonistic toward creators and innovators should result in fewer lawsuits and more freedom for artists and composers. Technology has advanced way beyond physical, analog methods of printing books and magazines, as well as preserving live performances, speeches and music for future generations.

Laws need to accommodate both old and new, and for "limited times," if the Constitutional mandate is to be followed.

[zeugma]

Laws need to accommodate both old and new, and for "limited times," if the Constitutional mandate is to be followed.

As long as Disney exists, this is not going to happen.

The big problem is that corporations are immortal, so their desires viz copyright are somewhat different from actual people. For a corporation, a 200 year copyright would make perfect sense. It's kind of funny because Disney makes extensive use of the public domain when it suits their purposes. If you take a look on how they dealt with Kipling's Jungle Book, that's kind of informative as well. When they started work on the original Jungle Book cartoon Kipling's book was still under copyright. The copyright expired before Disney released it so they never had to pay a penny in royalties. If I remember correctly, if copyright law back in the 60s had been the same as they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to release Jungle Book royalty free until just a year or 2 ago.