Chronicling America passes one million pages

Chronicling America made the news a couple of weeks ago for hitting the one million page mark.  This project, started in 2007, is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program, which in turn is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and the states, “to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers published between 1836 and 1922.” This enhanced access will be accomplished through digitizing of “historically significant titles that are aggregated and permanently maintained by the Library of Congress.” This content is made available free of charge on the Chronicling America’s website.

This really is an accomplishment, and I can truly appreciate the amount of work that has gone, and will continue to go, into this project.  Can you imagine being the one who has to decide which pages, out of your entire collection of newspapers on microfilm, are “historically significant”?  For example, I know that the Oklahoma History Center has over 12,000 reels of microfilm for their state, and that covers just newspapers published before 1923!  If you estimate that each reel of microfilm contains approximately 850 images (pages), that amounts to around 10,200,000 newspaper pages.  Each state gets to choose 100,000 pages to be digitized and put on the Chronicling America’s website.

The project provides a grant to each participating state to pay for the digitization.  What a fantastic plus this is for the states.  Not only are budgets in general being cut, but budgets for this type of project are almost non-existent.  To add to the pain, the digitization specifications of the project are very stringent.  Now, the really hard part is, you have to decide which 1% of these pages should be digitized because they are historically significant.  Oh my!

Check out the website for this project.  You will see some great stuff.  Kudos to everyone involved in this project, from the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, and those folks at the state level who are the ones who have to make it happen.

P.S.  Sorry people, I can’t help myself.  I just found out that newspaperARCHIVE.com (who I happen to work for) just passed the two million page mark - for the month of June!