The Bay Citizen - a new SF Bay Area news source

If you have been searching for more coverage of local news, the Bay Citizen may help you with your informational needs.

From the mission statement:

"The mission of The Bay Citizen is to enhance civic and community news coverage in the Bay Area, stimulate innovation in journalism, and foster civic engagement.

Across the nation, the field of journalism and access to local news about civic and cultural issues are in jeopardy.

In the Bay Area, local newspapers have cut their newsrooms by nearly 50% in the last five years. And coverage of civic news topics – including education, government, the environment, science, health, and arts – have been cut dramatically compared to topics such as sports and entertainment.

Professional journalism is worth saving. The Bay Citizen aims to provide unbiased and independent coverage of news, which we believe is critical to a functioning democracy and the information health of our communities."

For more information about the Bay Citizen (including the nature of its relationships with the New York Times and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism), take a look at their FAQ page.

Here are some examples of the fascinating articles by the reporters at Bay Citizen:

Bold Ideas Inspire New Life for Magazines by Jeanne Carstensen
The magazine as form being revitalized as evidenced by Longshot (delivered as a print on demand product through MagCloud) and Pop-Up Magazine (magazine as live action theater).

On Gold Coast, a Legacy of Low Taxes by Elizabeth Lesly Stevens
An article describing the discrepancies in the amount of property tax owed on some of the City's most valuable domestic properties. The article includes an interactive graphic that shows a portion of Broadway with pictures of houses together with their estimated current value, their assessed value, and property tax.

In Tough Times, Grandpa Pushes Pills by Shoshana Walter
The economic downturn and the increasing street demand for prescription drugs has broadened the demographics of the "drug dealer" in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco.

Mark Twain, Bay Area Man Around Town by Thalia Gigerenzer
This article gives a brief description of Twain's history and writing while in California (including a stint at the San Francisco Daily Morning Call). Part of a series of articles that celebrates the recent publication of yet another edition of Twain's biography.

San Francisco City Directories on SF Genealogy

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Some time ago, the Internet Archive digitized a substantial portion of the San Francisco city directories online. In our previous posting, the collection ranged from 1850 to 1953. Since then, even more directories up to 1982 have been scanned and uploaded to the Web. For quick access to a listing of these city directories, follow these steps:

1. Point your browser to SF Genealogy.

2. Select San Francisco County.

3. Select Quicklinks.

4. Select Directories (online).

5. Scroll down the screen to "InternetArchive.com" to find a chronological listing of San Francisco city directories in digitized format.

Founded and maintained by Pamela Storm and Ron Filion, SF Genealogy strives to provide "free Internet access to genealogical and historical information for San Francisco, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the State of California." Includes birth, death, and marriage records transcribed from historic newspapers.

137 years of Popular Science - now available online

Popular Science recently announced that 137 years of its back issue archive is now available online through Google Book Search. If you access the archive through Google Book Search, you can browse through the issues and covers all in one place.

While at the Google site you can also browse through other magazine archives, including Ebony, Men's Health, and Spin.

However, if you prefer to view the print version of Popular Science, come by the Magazines & Newspapers Center.

SF City Directories available online through Internet Archive

A number of San Francisco city directories are now available online through the Internet Archive website. This means you can browse through directories from as early as 1850 up to 1953 from anywhere with Internet access.

As you may know, these directories can be a source of great genealogical information such as helping establish residency dates, residential property status, and providing spouse and employment/profession information.

To see a list of these directories and other content scanned from the San Francisco Public Library, please follow this link: http://www.archive.org/details/sfpl

Hint: To find the directories, use the "browse by title" list and select "T" (for "The San Fran..." roughly for the years 1850-1879), "C" (for Crocker-Langley 1891-1929), or "P" (for Polk's 1931-1953).

Information about the Internet Archive and its mission is available here: http://www.archive.org/about/about.php

Scanning the Radio Airwaves

The digital TV transition is here to stay, but long before we received our daily dose of news stories by browsing Google News, watching CNN on TV, subscribing to blogs and news sites via RSS feeds, listening to breaking news from podcasts, or pulling up instant information from PDAs (personal digital assistants), we kept up with the news through the radio airwaves.

Radio news continues to fill the airwaves and you can now tap into Radio-Locator, labeled as "the most comprehensive radio station search engine on the internet." This online resource boasts links to over 10,000 radio stations and 2500 audio streams worldwide. You can look up radio stations by entering a city, radio call numbers, Internet streaming audio by music genre, and country. An advanced search offers even more intricate ways of locating a radio station such as by frequency signal.

And for radio aficionados, the Magazines & Newspapers Center offers some periodicals including Monitoring Times and Popular Communications to whet your appetite.

Monitoring Times - Geared for radio listeners, this magazine features news on radio communications, scanner monitoring with loggings, international radio, broadcast schedules. Also highlights new technologies such as "HD Radio."

Popular Communications - Devoted to users and enthusiasts of VHF scanners, short wave receivers, radar detectors, satellite TV, and cellular phones.

So instead of surfing through hundreds of channels on your TV the next time you want to get your daily news fix, try tuning into a radio station with the Radio-Locator.

Finding Magazines Through Google Book Search

One of Google's longstanding missions has been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." In a blog post from the Official Google Blog, Google has expanded its Google Book Search to incorporate magazine articles into this specialized online collection. Some titles include Ebony, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Vegetarian Times, and more.

To search specifically for articles from magazines, access the Advanced Book Search page and limit your search to magazines:

Once you find a title, you can explore the individual issues withing a specific set of years, click on any given cover, browse through the contents just as you would if you had the magazine in your hands, and peruse the magazine page by page, search through a specific issue, and more. While this collection is not complete, Google plans to add more digitized images to this archive as time goes on.

Remember that if you cannot find a specific magazine or issue, you can still rely on the Magazines & Newspapers Center, and we'll be happy to help you.

Online Life Photo Archive

In a previous post, we highlighted some magazines whose covers you can peruse and view directly on the Web. According to a recent New York Times article, Google's Image Search acquired over 10 million photos from Life Magazine--a searchable treasure trove for the connoisseur of quality photojournalism.

Life Magazine, noted for its chronicling of diverse aspects of American life, provides a nice pastiche of aesthetic and stunning photographs from all walks of life. In this online archive--enhanced with Google's image search technology--you can now search for images of people, places, and events from America's past.

According to Google's description:

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

To read this article from the New York Times or to explore old issues of Life Magazine, feel free to drop by the Magazines & Newspapers Center, and we'll be happy to help you get your hands on the physical copies of these periodicals.

Online Source for Nineteenth Century Magazines

A number of full-text magazines are available online as part of a project called "The Nineteenth Century in Print: the Making of America in Books and Periodicals." This is part of the larger American Memory Project initiated by the Library of Congress and the National Digital Library Program.

Here is a description of this collection from the Web site:

"The Nineteenth Century in Print: The Making of America in Books and Periodicals represents a special collaboration among the Library of Congress and the libraries of the University of Michigan and Cornell University to make accessible a wide-ranging digital library of nineteenth-century American printed materials. It will comprise [of] primary documents of American history reflecting the broad domains of social and political history, education, psychology, sociology, religion, and science and technology as they developed throughout the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras (1850-77). The collection also has special riches to offer readers interested in such areas as the nation's westward expansion, its poetry, the growth of professional forestry and landscape design, or Americans' abiding fascination with self-improvement."

The titles available on the University of Michigan Web site are:

American Jewess 1895 - 1899 (hosted on behalf of the Jewish Women's Archive)

Appleton's 1869 - 1881 (2 series)
Catholic World 1865 - 1901
DeBow's 1846 - 1869 + 1952 index (3 series)
Garden and Forest 1888 - 1897 (hosted on behalf of the Library of Congress)
Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers 1880-1891
Ladies Repository 1841 - 1876 (3 series)
The Old Guard 1864
Overland Monthly 1868 - 1900 (2 series)
Princeton Review 1831 - 1882 (3 series)
Southern Literary Messenger 1835 - 1864 + 1936 Contributor index
Southern Quarterly Review 1842 - 1857 (3 series)
Vanity Fair 1860 - 1862

The titles available on the Cornell University site are:

The American Missionary (1878 - 1901)
The American Whig Review (1845 - 1852)
The Atlantic Monthly (1857 - 1901)
The Bay State Monthly (1884 - 1886)
The Century (1881 - 1899)
The Continental Monthly (1862 - 1864)
The Galaxy (1866 - 1878)
Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1850 - 1899)
The International Monthly Magazine (1850 - 1852)
The Living Age (1844 - 1900)
Manufacturer and Builder (1869 - 1894)
The New England Magazine (1886 - 1900)
The New-England Magazine (1831 - 1835)
New Englander (1843 - 1892)
The North American Review (1815 - 1900)
The Old Guard (1863 - 1867)
Punchinello (1870)
Putnam's Monthly (1853 - 1870)
Scientific American (1846 - 1869)
Scribner's Magazine (1887 - 1896)
Scribner's Monthly (1870 - 1881)
The United States Democratic Review (1837 - 1859)

Sports Illustrated: The Vault

A new feature on the Sports Illustrated Web site, The Vault, now offers free access to an archive of past articles, photos, and covers that were published during the magazine's 54 year history. One can search by keyword and refine by date as well as browse individual issues cover to cover.

For an example of some of the riches one can find on this database, see the following links:

An article about Golden Gate Park circa July 20, 1959:

(excerpt)

"Strange and frequently momentous doings are almost always afoot in the gorgeous greenery of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a squared-off tract three and a half miles long that was once a shifting Sahara of 50-foot dunes. In the proper season hordes of young athletes are at large on Big Rec Field, their backs emblazoned with legends that read "Johnson's Tamales" or "Wally's Fork Lifts," identifying the sponsors of the park's sandlot league which has spawned three DiMaggios, Tony Lazzeri, Babe Pinelli, Willie Kamm and such current lights as Gil McDougald, Gerry Coleman and Gus Triandos.

In the mating season buffalo bulls fight it out for the supremacy of a herd that roams a great green paddock undulating over Golden Gate's northwest acres. Just down the curving South Drive, past the bowling green where septuagenarians in the blue blazers and white ducks of the Bowling Club roll spheroids down the Kelly-green grass, young tennists gambol on Golden Gate's orange-and-green courts. Knowingly or not, they tread on territory hallowed by that oldtime great, Maurice McLoughlin, and later by Don Budge, Alice Marble, Art Larsen and Tom Brown, all of whom began the long climb by bouncing up the rungs of the park's peppy tournament program. And while all these efforts are expended in behalf of glory, on autumn Sundays the 49ers, those hard-blocking Hessians, perform for pay in Kezar Stadium, home of the East-West football game, which occupies a corner of the park too."

The most famous baseball pitcher to have never played a game

(excerpt)

"The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottlemyre and a few members of the Mets' front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick's Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch's fastball. The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighs about five pounds and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher. A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch's velocity—accurate, so the manufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of the gauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is named after the oldtimer's descriptive—the "jug-handled" curveball) was a Roscoe Tanner serve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned for a baseball was 103 mph, which it did, curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the 1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at that speed. On March 17, the gun was handled by Stottlemyre. He heard the pop of the ball in Reynolds's mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. Then the astonishing figure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottlemyre remembers whistling in amazement, and then he heard Reynolds say, "Don't tell me, Mel, I don't want to know...."

Online: Magazine Cover Galleries

A popular pastime for people interested in popular culture and history is browsing old magazine covers. Many people continue to perform this activity in our collection of back issues here at the Main Library, but some magazine Web sites allow one to peruse these artifacts from a computer.
Here is a sampling of just a few:

Life Magazine (http://www.life.com/Life/cover_search/).

Life has a full archive of covers that begin as far back as 1936 . One can search the archive by keyword or date as well as a few slide show collections such as "Most famous Life covers".

Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/coversearch)

Time also has a full archive of covers that range back to 1923. It also provides keyword searching and have a few featured searches, such as "This Week in History" which shows the covers from issues 5, 10, 20, and 50 years ago.

Sports Illustrated (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/covers/)

Sports Illustrated offers a similar archive that begins in 1954. One can also locate covers by searching for any author of the cover stories. This is available through the advanced search page.

Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/photos/covers)

The magazine cover archive of Rolling Stone is another conduit for seeing iconic historical timepieces, starting in 1967.

Vogue UK (http://www.vogue.co.uk/CoverArchive/)

Fashion magazines are another popular subject for cover searches. Vogue UK offers searches by year (going back to 1916), by model, and by artist/photographer.

Magazine and newspaper article databases in other languages

While the library has a large collection of print magazines and newspapers in other languages, we also have an online collection of magazines and newspapers in Chinese, Spanish and Russian. You can get to these from the Library’s Web site by selecting Articles & Databases. You will need a San Francisco Public Library card to log into these databases from home or anywhere outside the library.

While you’re at it, check out our new language learning database, Rosetta Stone. This database is an interactive program for learning Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish.

Chinese Magazines (Qikan)
200 current, popular Chinese language magazines published in China. Available in either traditional or simplified characters.

Clase Periódica—index
Index to Latin American journals in the sciences and humanities covering the time period from 1975 to present.

Consulta
Spanish language reference titles, periodicals, and more on a variety of topics.

Ethnic Newswatch
250 magazines and newspapers published in both English and Spanish covering the time period from 1960 to present from the U.S. ethnic and minority press.

¡Informe!
Covers hundreds of popular Hispanic magazines from 1999 to present.

Russian Newspapers (East View)
Newspapers in Russian from official sources, independent media and partisan publications covering the time period 1980 to present.