Digitization of Newspapers

Newspapers record history as it happens.  They are the web sites of the past and almost as susceptible to loss. To preserve these resources the National Endowment of Humanities along with the Library of Congress has developed the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Quoting from their web site “Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet.”

To help those interested in creating digital surrogates of theirs newspaper collections so that they can make them more publicly accessible, we suggested the following online resources:

Resources:

Good background document on the National Digital Newspaper Program. This gives you a good synopsis of what you might do in planning your program.

http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/pdf/NDNP_DigPreserv_0505.pdf

National Digital Newspaper Project main page:

http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/index.html

The OCLC has been offering Newspaper digitization services since the early 1990s, including managing and scanning. 

Examples:

Chronicling America:

http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/searchfulltextadvanced.html

Access to America's historic newspapers. This site allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

California Digital Newspaper Collection:  http://cdnc.ucr.edu/