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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Library and Information Science

Faculty Publications

Series

2014

Obituaries

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Getting The Crowd Into Obituaries: How A Unique Partnership Combined The World’S Largest Obituary Index With Utah’S Largest Historic Newspaper Database, Jeremy Myntti, John Alexander, John Herbert, Alan Witkowski Feb 2014

Getting The Crowd Into Obituaries: How A Unique Partnership Combined The World’S Largest Obituary Index With Utah’S Largest Historic Newspaper Database, Jeremy Myntti, John Alexander, John Herbert, Alan Witkowski

Faculty Publications

Utah Digital Newspaper

What we do

  • Create digital images of historic Utah newspapers
  • Create searchable text of every page/article
  • Make both images and text available on the Internet

Who we are

  • Run by J. Willard Marriott Library, Univ. of Utah
  • Entirely a “soft money” program
  • National leader, especially within the public sector


Getting The Crowd Into Obituaries: How A Unique Partnership Combined The World’S Largest Obituary Index With Utah’S Largest Historic Newspaper Database, Jeremy Myntti, John Herbert, Alan Witkowski, John Alexander Jan 2014

Getting The Crowd Into Obituaries: How A Unique Partnership Combined The World’S Largest Obituary Index With Utah’S Largest Historic Newspaper Database, Jeremy Myntti, John Herbert, Alan Witkowski, John Alexander

Faculty Publications

The Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN) and FamilySearch are joining forces to create an innovative obituary index. UDN contains 282,000 obituaries in its extensive database of historic Utah newspapers. UDN’s headlines are manually keyed (double-keyed and reconciled), and are nearly letter-perfect. However, the article text is created from raw optical character recognition software, which is often less than fully accurate.