Amateur Beats Gov't at Digitizing Newspapers: Tom Tryniski's Weird, Wonderful Website

One computer expert working alone has built a historic newspaper site (http://fultonhistory.com) that's orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend. Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress' Goliath.

Tryniski's site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page. In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.

For complete text and links, go to: http://bit.ly/YT5KcL

Video written, produced, shot and edited by Jim Epstein, who also narrates.

Approximately 5 minutes.

Go to http://reason.com/reasontv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.

• Category

  News & Politics

[Sascha Tausend]

They should give the next 22 million to this guy, he clearly deserves it and should be honoured for his work.

[deadrock01]

He didn't build that!!

[bigrodneyakatrey]

good job !

[ilikemitchhedberg]

Yet another example of what a lazy, worthless, entitled, money grubbing, piggish fools government workers are. I mean, ...

sigh

[TANKHOWLAND]

I like that old guy. Spends his time trying to make others life easier.

[Nafetitive]

Check it out at: fultonhistory (Dot) Com

That's the website of Mr. Tryniski.

[meandean222]

Where's the link to his site?

[UTubekookdetector]

Duly noted & TY. :)

[Alvin Mullins]

Yeah I was thinking it would come off as sincere if I didn't leave a hint but you were very cool about it.

[shamgar001]

Ah, my bad. You know how the internet is...

[Alvin Mullins]

I was being sarcastic, reminding people what our great leader said about people who do something with their lives.

[Alvin Mullins]

I was being sarcastic. I'm sure if the gov't was involved he wouldn't or couldn't have done it. After all there are probably tons of regs and union rules he broke by doing everything himself.