National Digital Newspaper Program
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The National Digital Newspaper Program is a joint project between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to create and maintain a publicly available, online digital archive of historically significant newspapers published in the United States between 1836 and 1922. Additionally, the program will make available bibliographic records and holdings information for some 140,000 newspaper titles from the 1600s to the present. Further, it will include scope notes and encyclopedia-style entries discussing the historical significance of specific newspapers. In March, 2007, more than 226,000 pages of newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910 were put online at a fully-searchable site called "Chronicling America." [1]
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[edit] History of the Program
On March 31, 2004, Bruce Cole, the directory of the NEH, and James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, signed an agreement creating the National Digital Newspaper Program. The NDNP follows in the footsteps of the successful United States Newspaper Program, a several-decade effort to catalog and microfilm the bulk of America's historic newspapers.
[edit] Phases
The NDNP is to be completed in several phases. Each successive phase will both increase the scope of the program and refine the requirements for data collection.
[edit] Phase 1
The first phase took newspapers from a small subset of the states, limited to 1900 through 1910. After using this phase to improve technical requirements and specifications, the program was opened to other awardees in Phase 2.
The awardees for Phase 1 are:
- University of California, Riverside
- University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville
- University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington
- New York Public Library, New York City
- University of Utah, Salt Lake City
- Library of Virginia, Richmond
The General-access Phase 1 website prototype was implemented in March, 2007.
[edit] Phase 2
Phase 2 expands grants to an additional group of institutions, with awards to be announced in July, 2007.
[edit] Program Technology
The technology for the NDNP digital repository is being built using largely open source software, including:
