Wow, the Wyoming Newspaper Project has a big scope! This new site aims to contain all the newspapers printed in Wyoming between 1849 and 1922. Eventually that will mean over 900,000 digitzed newspaper pages, but at the moment only about half that is available, with papers dating back to 1867 (the rest of the pages will be added in the coming weeks.) 450,000 pages is certainly nothing to sneeze at. The Wyoming Newspaper Project’s at http://www.wyonewspapers.org/.

I love the way you can browse this project. You can browse content by city or county, or you can search by keyword. Not only keyword but you can also search by similar concepts or pattern. I did a search for “Billy the Kid” and got 72 results. Results are presented in a table that shows the name and page number of the newspaper, city, year, month, and day. You can sort by any of the table’s fields. That’s how I learned the references to Billy the Kid started in 1881 and went until 1921.

Click on the first column of the table to get the page in which your keyword appears. I think from the page layout that the file is supposed to open in the browser, but for me it doesn’t; it’s a PDF file and Firefox asked me if I wanted to open it with my document viewer. That’s fine. I can use the Find feature of the document viewer to see the keyword within the pages.

The PDF files presented are full scans of the pages. A few of the ones I looked at were pretty torn, but many were in great shape and easy to read (well, easy once I brought them up to about 175% size.) The ads were great. There was an editorial cartoon on the front page of the January 4, 1913 Wyoming Press that seems rather prescient.

I could browse this all day. To find some advertisements to look at, search for “free catalog”. To view stock men’s advertisements of their brands, search for brand “left hip”. Well done Wyoming!