One man by himself digitized 22M pages of old newspapers vs. the Library of Congress, which spent $22M for 7M pages!

From Mark Perry of "Carpe Diem."

"From Jim Epstein at Reason’s Hit and Run Blog:

One retired engineer working alone has built an historic newspaper site that is orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy (the Library of Congress) that has received $22 million in funding for its project from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Armed with only a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, high school-educated Tom Tryniski working all by himself has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath.

Tryniski’s site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress’ historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page (based on $22 million in total grant funding for an estimated 7,271,000 pages that will eventually be on the website). In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed more than 6 million pages while Chronicling America registered fewer than 3 million views.

Who’d a-Thunk It? One dedicated entrepreneurial individual working without compensation outproduces/outdigitizes (by a factor of 3) a large government bureaucracy (and probably a small army of bureaucrats) that is spending millions and millions of taxpayer dollars?"