UK Libraries has been selected as one of 12 institutions across the United States to receive funding in 2023 for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the grant will allow UK Libraries to add 100,000 pages of historic Kentucky newspapers to the Chronicling America database.
Established in 2005, the NDNP is a partnership between the NEH and the Library of Congress. The program provides digital access to historically significant and unique U.S. newspapers through its Internet-based, searchable database, Chronicling America, which now includes over 25 million pages of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 from every U.S. state and territory.
This year’s grant will be UK Libraries’ fifth award. After four consecutive two-year awards from 2005-2013 – and a leading role in the nationwide program – UK Libraries reached the award limit. The NEH recently increased the cap to six awards, and Kopana Terry, the project’s Principal Investigator and UK Libraries Historic Newspapers Curator, is excited to resume work on the program.
“This grant has provided us with an opportunity to resurrect work that had been put to the side for several years,” said Terry. “These are materials that researchers draw on every day, across every discipline, and they’re going to be easier than ever to access. I’m so thrilled we can provide these resources to our users and to researchers around the world.”
As part of the initial preparatory work, NDNP team members have assembled an advisory board of historians, genealogists, and other experts who will provide guidance on the direction of the program and determine which newspaper titles to add to the database over the next two years.
One addition that is certain is the Louisville Courier-Journal, the newspaper of record for the state. UK Libraries imaged the Courier-Journal in partnership with the Louisville Free Public Library, which had original copies of the newspaper from the turn of the 20th century in bound volumes stored in a warehouse. The newspaper was sharing the space with a small flock of pigeons. “It was messy work,” laughed Terry, “but we digitized 18,000 pages.”
The Courier-Journal began utilizing four-color printing in the early 20th century for front pages, special sections, and advertisements. Due to storage limitations, the Chronicling America database could not accept color images until now.
“This is a big step for Chronicling America, and a big step for us,” said Terry. “It will allow us to provide content as it was intended to be seen.”
The NDNP has also widened the date range for its collections, opened the program to papers in languages other than English, and permitted the inclusion of materials that are not in the public domain, if libraries can prove their eligibility.
These new program parameters will allow UK Libraries to contribute modern African American titles, German-language newspapers from immigrant communities along the Ohio River, and the Kentucky Gazette, the oldest newspaper in Kentucky and the first to be published west of the Alleghenies. UK Libraries, in partnership with the Lexington Public Library, has digitized copies of the Kentucky Gazette from 1787 to 1840.
At the outset, the NEH said that the NDNP would be a 20-year program. “We started with the beginning of the program,” said Terry, “and it would be wonderful if we could end with it, too.”
UK Libraries has been a national leader in the NDNP since the program’s inception. One of only six institutions to receive funding in the program’s first year, UK Libraries was the only awardee at the time to use an entirely in-house film-to-digital production methodology. This pioneering work allowed UK Libraries to refine the standards for digitizing newspapers and to develop the meta | morphosis training program, which was utilized by other state institutions entering the program and is still in use around the world.
From 2005 to 2013, UK Libraries contributed nearly 400,000 pages from 79 historic Kentucky newspapers.
For papers that weren’t eligible in the earliest rounds of the NDNP, UK Libraries created its own digital repository, the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program (KDNP). Through cooperative endeavors with the Kentucky Press Association and the Internet Archive, the KDNP provides access to nearly a million pages of Kentucky newspapers, with content growing daily.
UK Libraries has been at the forefront of newspaper preservation for decades. Eminent Kentucky historian Dr. Thomas D. Clark and former Director of UK Libraries Dr. Lawrence S. Thompson pioneered a newspaper-preservation program in the 1940s, traveling state backroads with a microfilm camera, copy stand, and two incandescent light bulbs to film as many papers as they could find.
In 1981, UK Libraries’ microfilm operation became one of the first five participants in the NEH’s United States Newspaper Program. Over the 30-year program, the Libraries cataloged 4,750 Kentucky newspaper titles, microfilmed 1.5 million pages, and expanded the collection to 20,000 reels.
Today, UK Libraries boasts a collection of 30,000 microfilm reels of newspapers. A new licensing agreement with Newspapers.com will see all of these reels digitized and made available to researchers around the world.
“This has been a great year for newspapers at UK Libraries,” said Terry. “For me personally and professionally, it’s the best that I could ask for.”
Co-PIs for the new NDNP grant include Deirdre Scaggs, Associate Dean for Research & Discovery, who will administer the program; Kate Seago, Director of Acquisitions, who will manage copyright; and Sarah Dorpinghaus, Director of Digital Strategies & Technology, who will direct program technologies. A program manager will be hired this fall.
The Advisory Board is made up of Reinette Jones, Special Collections Research Center Librarian and African American & Africana Studies Affiliate; Kathryn Engle, Appalachian Center Director; David Thompson, Kentucky Press Association Executive Director; Sarah Hubbard, Manager of the Kentucky Room, Lexington Public Library; and Kathy Lloyd-Vaughan, Director of the Scott County Public Library.
