The Making of America I (MOA1) project is a pioneering collaboration between Cornell and the University of Michigan to digitize a broad spectrum of popular nineteenth century serials and monographs. MOA established guidelines for digitization and outsourcing that have been adopted by many other repositories. For several years Cornell provided access to page images of the volumes via its prototype digital library. Several tests conducted in 1999 proved that it was technically and economically feasible using optical character recognition software to convert to machine-readable form the full text of some 900,000 pages of journals. While working for CIDC staff member David Ruddy encoded the machine-readable texts and accompanying metadata in SGML. It is now possible to conduct a search at the MOA web site for any word or phrase in the text of an MOA journal and connect immediately to the image of the page containing that text.
"Did
my mother's great-grandfather fight in the Civil War? What were the
hottest new fashions in the summer
of 1850?
What did Thomas Edison himself have to say in 1878 about the
phonograph, one of his most famous inventions?
Read the full article here: <http://www.library.cornell.edu/friends/read/moa.html>