Grant helps UO create digital link to history

Newspapers across the state will be digitized for regional and national database

Pamplin Media Group, Jun 29, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Courtesy of UO Knight Library

Karen Estlund, digital collections coordinator for the University of Oregon Knight Library, will head the statewide Oregon Digital Newspaper Project.

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The University of Oregon will use a $364,042 federal grant to help link Oregonians to history by digitizing state newspapers from 1860 to 1922.

The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress will be combined with $145,000 in matching grants from the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office and Oregon Heritage Commission through the Oregon Cultural Trust, to digitize 100,000 pages of Oregon newspapers.

The project will add to the university’s “long history of collaboration with the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association,” said Karen Estlund, digital collections coordinator for the university’s Knight Library, who will head the statewide Oregon Digital Newspaper Project.

The program will provide access for people who can’t get to a library to use microfilm, Estlund said.

“The full text available with the digitized images allows for keyword searching, which revolutionizes research of old newspapers,” she said. “No longer will a researcher need to spend hours, days or even weeks scrolling through microfilm hoping to catch what they’re looking to find.”

Several newspapers owned by the Pamplin Media Group could be among those whose content is digitized by the project.

Since 1953, the Knight Library’s Oregon Newspaper Program has worked with the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association to put all of the state’s newspapers on microfilm for preservation. The new project began early this year under a $79,883 Library Services & Technology block grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Oregon State Library in Salem.

“Historic newspapers supply vital evidence of our history and culture and are used by students, scholars, historians, arts groups, businesses, urban planners, genealogists and others,” Estlund said. “These primary source materials provide a window into the life of local Oregon communities a century or more ago, covering early environmental preservation, industry, agriculture, urban development, Native American and race relations, the establishment of the state and more.”

Oregon’s newspapers will join the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America Web site, a free national, searchable database of historic American newspaper pages published between 1880 and 1922. The site was launched in March 2007 and has institutions in 22 states involved in the project.

Chronicling America has historic newspaper content from 11 states and the District of Columbia. It will eventually contain 20 million pages of historic American newspapers from 1836 to 1922 and offer educational essays on every title represented and a directory of all newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present.