University Park

Libraries begin Pennsylvania Digital Newspaper Project Phase III

@font-face { font-family: "Times";}@font-face { font-family: "New York";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Penn State University Libraries' Digitization and Preservation Department have received, from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a $321,526 grant to begin the Pennsylvania Digital Newspaper Project, Phase III (PaDNP3) 2012-14. As part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) over the next two years, PaDNP3 will digitize from microfilm approximately 100,000 pages from historic newspaper titles published between 1836 and 1922 and upload the items to Chronicling America, a free online repository of digitized newspapers from across the country maintained by the Library of Congress.

With this grant, the Library of Congress made it possible for PaDNP3 to consider non-English titles that reflect the commonwealth’s ethnic heritage for inclusion in Chronicling America, which is now accepting German, Italian, French and Spanish, in addition to English language content.

A grant of $393,489 funded Phase II, 2010–12, which digitized from microfilm 157,694 pages from 46 historic newspaper titles published between 1836 and 1922, representing 21 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. With a grant of $393,650, the earlier Phase I of the project digitized 103,326 pages from four titles published between 1880 and 1922 in four counties.

All the titles currently uploaded to Chronicling America can be found at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/?state=Pennsylvania&ethnicity=&language=.

Since 1985, the Penn State University Libraries have participated in numerous external grant-supported and consortia-wide preservation activities for microfilming, preservation planning, digitization, and cataloging and access. With this most recent grant from NEH for PaDNP3, the University Libraries have received more than $2.2 million over the past 21 years.

For more details on the project, contact Karen Morrow, project manager, at kkm111@psu.edu or 814-865-9475. Visit the Pennsylvania Newspaper Project website http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digipres/panp.html for more information about preservation microfilming and digitization.

 

 

Last Updated October 24, 2012