Major Update to the Digital Archives!

 In order to provide greater access to even more Medina County newspapers, The Digital Archives has undergone a MAJOR update.

If you are new to the Digital Archives, Lauren did an excellent blog on this fantastic database on February 17th: Introducing the Digital Archives of MCDL The blog tells what is included in the database and how to search and save the articles.

What is different?

Now, if you are inside one of the Medina County District Library branches you have access to more publications and more years.

For example, I used the database extensively to research the history of the Girl Scouts in Medina County for last week's blog.

From the remote, publicly-available access to the database my results looked like this:

Notice that the search returned 537 results and it lists six publications covering the decades 1910 (remember the Girl Scouts were founded in 1912) through 1970.

From within any of the six Medina County District Library locations, the search results look like this:

Notice the search has now returned almost double the results with 936 entries. The publications represented is now 10, including some very unique items held by the Medina County Historical Society and the Lodi Harrisville Historical Society. Match Tips was a company newsletter put out by the Ohio Match Company in Wadsworth. Bank Notes was published by the Savings Deposit Bank in Medina.

The years represented now cover the 1980's and 90's. Even the 1970's now has 292 search results compared to 183 pages in the publicly available version of the database.

Access is still through https://www.mcdl.info/newspapers

To access the expanded coverage, visit any of the MCDL branches: Brunswick, Buckeye, Highland, Lodi, Medina or Seville.  Hours and locations can be found here: About Us

So why have two different levels of access depending on where you use the database? 

Copyright law. 

U.S. copyright law says that publications 95 years or older are in the public domain, which allows anyone to use it. For newspapers, that means anything published in 1926 or older is in public domain. And any newspapers published after 1977 are protected under current copyright law.

But the years 1927-1977? 

It depends. Those years are a grey area in copyright law. IF the newspaper published a compliant copyright notice, then they are protected. We have not found a published copyright notice for the Medina newspapers for those years. *

*http://www.advantagearchives.com/blog/the-advantage-companies-newspaper-copyright-law/#:~:text=The%20copyright%20laws%20we%20refer,therefor%20they%20have%20copyright%20protection.