From: "Laura Gottesman" <lgot@loc.gov> To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib@sunsite.berkeley.edu> Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 4:27 PM Subject: [WEB4LIB] National Digital Library: The Stars and Stripes: The American > Greetings: > > This announcement is being sent to a number of lists. Please accept > our > apologies for any duplicate postings: > > The Library of Congress' Serial & Government Publications Division is > pleased to announce the release of a new addition to the National > Digital Library - the online collection The Stars and Stripes: The > American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919, available on the > American Memory website at: > http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sgphtml/sashtml/. > > At the direction of General John J. Pershing, The Stars and Stripes > newspaper was published in France by the United States Army from > February 8, 1918 to June 13, 1919. By early 1918, American forces were > dispersed throughout the western front, often mixed at the unit level > with British, French and Italian forces. The primary mission of The > Stars and Stripes was to provide these scattered troops with a sense of > unity and an understanding of their part in the overall war effort. The > eight-page weekly featured news from home, poetry, cartoons and sports > news, with a staff that included journalists Alexander Woollcott, Harold > Wallace Ross and Grantland Rice. On borrowed printing presses, using a > delivery network that combined trains, automobiles (including three > Cadillacs) and one motorcycle, the staff produced a newspaper with a > circulation that peaked at 526,000 copies. This new online collection > presents the complete run - 71 weeks - of the World War I edition. > > The collection also includes special presentations that discuss the > newspaper's content: its illustrations and advertising, its publication > of soldiers' poetry, its coverage of women. Brief biographies of > editorial staff members and their later careers hint at the level of > journalistic talent within The Stars and Stripes. A timeline and map > place the newspaper within the greater historical and geographical > context of the war. > > The collection was processed with optical character recognition (OCR) > software to allow users to search the full text of the newspaper for a > word or phrase. This feature expands the collection's usefulness to > historians and genealogists researching names and details that do not > appear in the headlines. The Stars and Stripes collection served as a > pilot project in the development of search and display capabilities to > be utilized on future releases of historic newspapers. > > Please direct all general inquiries to: > http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus2.html