The National Digital Newspaper Program

Bruce Cole

On March 31, I signed an agreement with James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, that will ultimately lead to the creation of a unique digital resource for the study of American history and culture. Under the terms of this partnership, the Endowment will make grants to convert microfilm of historic United States newspapers into digital files, which will then be mounted (and permanently maintained) by the Library on a national and fully searchable database that will be accessible to all our citizens free via the Internet.

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) will be a complex, multiyear undertaking. NEH will provide support for the digitization of thirty million pages of historically significant newspapers over the next twenty years through awards made to institutions in every state of the Union and its territories. These digitized materials will focus on the extensive and crucial period of the nation’s history from 1836 to 1923. The database will therefore complement digital resources that will cover earlier periods of the country’s history. Many newspapers published after 1923 are not yet in the public domain and hence could not be candidates for inclusion in the NDNP at this time. Current plans also call for incorporating into the NEH/LC database bibliographic records of all newspapers held in U.S. institutions, so that users of the website can find not only digital images of newspapers but information about access to newspapers in every available format.

The NDNP builds on the foundation established by an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program (USNP). Since 1982, the Endowment has supported a cooperative, national effort to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm American newspapers published from the eighteenth century to the present. NEH has now funded newspaper projects in all the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. We expect to conclude the program in 2007. When currently funded projects are completed, descriptive records for more than 200,000 unique newspaper titles will have been created and 67.5 million pages of (often fragile) newsprint will have been microfilmed. The Library of Congress has provided technical assistance for the USNP since its inception.

It is a pleasure to recall that the OAH played an important role in the genesis of the USNP. In 1969, its committee on the Bibliographical and Research Needs of the Organization of American Historians recommended that Winifred Gregory’s American Newspapers, 1821-1936 be revised. A few years later, when NEH requested that the American Council of Learned Societies undertake a survey to determine the research tools that were most needed by its members, a revision of Gregory was accorded a high priority by the OAH as well as by the American Historical Association and the Society of American Archivists. The OAH subsequently received grants from the Endowment for a project to explore how the Gregory bibliography could be updated. The findings of this project, coupled with the results of a model pilot project conducted by OAH through the Iowa State Historical Department, established the feasibility of launching a national program for historic newspapers that would encompass preservation as well as bibliographic concerns.

The needs and judgments of historians will continue to be an essential component of NEH’s new digital newspaper program. Scholars in the various states will be involved in the selection of titles proposed for digitization and they will be consulted at various stages of the construction and use of this national database. Their work will then be augmented by the knowledge of hundreds of librarians, archivists, and technical specialists, as well as by access to the holdings of libraries and archives across the country. I like to think that the NDNP is an example of the critical contribution that a national endowment for the humanities can make to our nation—through its capacity to envision and then deploy public funds to translate a great cultural project, which by definition demands a sustained cooperative effort by individuals and institutions, into an achieved reality for the American people.

Historical newspapers are perhaps the single, most comprehensive resource on which to base a study of America’s past. It is for this reason that NEH has designated the NDNP as part of its new initiative entitled We the People. Newspapers have chronicled the daily life of America’s citizens in small towns and cities, since the first newspaper appeared in the colonies in 1690. They vividly document the civic, political, social, and cultural events of the nation’s history. The Endowment’s first newspaper program, the USNP, ensured (in a predigital era) that this widely scattered and highly vulnerable corpus was organized and then cataloged and preserved on microfilm to consistent national standards. Now the NDNP will complete the process of making these materials fully accessible, by digitizing microfilmed newspaper titles from every state so that they will be available for use in academic offices, classrooms and homes across the nation. Scholars will have ready access to essential primary materials. Teachers will be able to integrate these materials into their lesson plans and classroom instruction. Parents will be able to sit down with their children to learn about the people and events that have shaped our country. And citizens of all ages will be able to enter a vast storehouse of local, regional, and national information about the great experiment in freedom and democracy that is America.