The New York Public Library just posted more than 9,000 pages from The Richmond County Advance online, covering the years 1886 to 1910. Find them at nypl.org/sinewspapers. This "NYPL Innovation Project" began with the scanning of the Advance from the collections of Historic Richmond Town. It is the largest batch of historical Staten Island papers ever posted to the Web — and it is changing the way we explore the Island’s past. The Advance joins the Richmond County Mirror online, which was previously posted by the New York Public Library.

In the past, if the date of an article was unknown, researchers could spend days or even weeks hunting for it on microfilm. Now, it is only a matter of seconds. Historical newspapers can be useful to all different kinds of people:

• Genealogists seeking information about ancestors will find a treasure trove of information about the Island’s early residents. 
• Students and teachers can learn about how national and global events affected their own communities.
• Scientists seeking to model changes in the climate can easily trace local weather events back to the 1800s.
• Historians can follow the development of Island social and political issues across the decades. Very often these newspapers are the only record left of significant historical events.

Who knows what other new and exciting uses we can expect from this sizable resource? The articles in our digital newspapers can be supplemented with thousands of historical Staten Island images and maps in the NYPL Digital Collectionsoral histories, and Historic Richmond Town’s Online Collections, to give us a more complete picture of the past.

Our work is just getting started. Soon the online Advance and Mirror will be joined by many more papers from our new partner, the Staten Island Musem. Find links to these newspapers, and Island papers uploaded by other institutions, at nypl.org/sinewspapers. Additional papers soon to be uploaded include: the Staten Island World, The Richmond County Free Press, more issues of the Richmond County Advance, The Daily Advance, early issues of The Staten Island Advance, The Staten Island Gazette, The Sepoy, The News Letter, Richmond County Sentinel, Richmond County Democrat, Staten Island Independent, Staten Island Transcript ...

NYPL, the Staten Island Museum and Historic Richmond Town have long-held these historical papers on microfilm and each has many more titles in their on-site collections.  A complete guide to Staten Island newspapers on microfilm (and in their original paper format) can be found here.  It is our goal to make all of our papers digital and easily accessible to everyone.

The most recent years of the modern Staten Island Advance are available at the paper’s own website, silive.com.

What will you discover at nypl.org/sinewspapers?

Funding for the digitization of Staten Island newspapers was provided through The New York Public Library's Innovation Project, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Charles H. Revson Foundation.