Digitization Projects

The Nebraska Digital Newspaper Project:  A National Digital Newspaper Program affiliate

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC) are collaborating on a major grant program to digitize historically significant newspaper titles from each of the states and territories of the U.S.  Called the National Digital Newspaper Program,  digitized newspapers selected for the program will become part of the freely-available full-text database, Chronicling America, that is hosted at the Library of Congress at URL http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica.  Eventually, the selected historical newspapers will date from 1836 through 1922.

NDNP Group Photo

NDNP project team members in Nebraska

In July 2007, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, the Nebraska State Historical Society, and the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communication, received funding from NEH to digitize 100,000 pages of newspapers from 1880-1910.   This is a great partnership effort among state agencies.  The Nebraska State Historical Society has millions of frames of newspaper microfilm for the state, some of it developed using NEH funds; the UNL Libraries and Center for Digital Research in the Humanities have significant experience with newspapers and digital technologies including metadata and imaging; and the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communication serves an important role in preserving the history of journalism.  

Among required NEH criteria for digitization is that titles be English-language titles that are significant historically, representing a geographic, economic, and political diversity.  Even if these criteria are met, the source microfilm used for digitization must meet certain technical specifications, or the titles cannot be included in the project.   

Based on these criteria, the advisory board for the project selected the following titles and dates of coverage for this initial grant period:

Omaha Daily Bee (Morning Edition), 1880-1899
Columbus Journal, 1898-1910
Conservative (Nebraska City), 1898-1902
Custer County Republican, 1901-1910
Fall City Tribune, 1904-1910
McCook Tribune, 1883-1910
Norfolk Weekly News-Journal, 1900-1910
Valentine Democrat and its related titles, 1897-1910

The board agreed that if technical specifications continue to be achieved for the title, the Omaha Daily Bee will eventually be digitized from 1874 through 1922.  

In time, the Library of Congress will include non-English-language titles in Chronicling America, and the partners in Nebraska are committed even in this grant cycle to raising funds to extend the project beyond English-language titles.  Czech, Native American, German, Danish, and other languages were very important in the settlement of  Nebraska—and immigrant newspapers and those of Native peoples remind us of our broad heritage.  Nebraska would also prefer to digitize more than 100,000 English-language pages for each time period.  The UNL Libraries will host a Nebraska-specific digital site on its servers to allow the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities to experiment with multiple-language display and searching, and to host as many Nebraska titles as fundraising allows.  The University will provide information about the language experiment that may be useful to the Library of Congress when the national project is eventually expanded.   

For more information about the Nebraska Digital Newspaper Project, contact Katherine Walter, Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and Chair, Digital Initiatives & Special Collections at UNL.  Walter, the project director for the NDNP in Nebraska, can be reached at kwalter1@unl.edu or (402) 472-3939.

Links

Online Newspapers

Cataloging Online Newspapers - Conser Cataloging Manual