Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1756-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities external link and the Library of Congress. Learn more

What is OCR?

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a fully automated process that converts the visual image of numbers and letters into computer-readable numbers and letters. Computer software can then search the OCR-generated text for words, phrases, numbers, or other characters. However, OCR is not 100 percent accurate, and, particularly if the original item has extraneous markings on the page, unusual text styles, or very small fonts, the searchable text OCR generates will contain errors that cannot be corrected by automated means.

Although errors in the process are unavoidable, OCR is still a powerful tool for making text-based items accessible to searching. For example, important concept words often appear more than once within an article. Therefore, if OCR misreads one instance of a key word in a passage, but correctly reads the second instance, the passage will still be found in a full-text search.

To enable research and external services Chronicling America provides bulk access to its OCR data. The table below itemizes a list of data files available for download. Each file will decompress into directory structure that lets you easily map the OCR file to the URL identifier for that page. For example a file such as sn830030214/1903/05/01/ed-1/seq-1/ocr.txt maps to the URL https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn830030214/1903-05-01/ed-1/seq-1/.

If you are interested in automated access to this data you may want to use the Atom and JSON versions of this table.

Please note: Some batches contain digitized newspaper pages that lack corresponding OCR text. For this reason, after decompressing the downloadable files, the number of ocr.txt files may not match the page count available within the HTML, Atom and JSON batch views.

Update (July 2019): In early June 2019, an error was identified with the OCR Bulk Data download files available from the OCR report. These errors have been corrected but any files downloaded between February 5th and June 3rd 2019 should be replaced with the current versions. The source OCR data for all newspaper pages currently ingested in Chronicling America are also available at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/.
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