Digital Preservation Development

The New York Public Library is one of six founding participants in the National Digital Newspaper Program and serves as the lead for the conversion of historically significant newspapers produced in the city and state of New York. NDNP is a collaborative effort funded and administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress, in partnership with state projects across the country. The program is preserving and providing enhanced access to United States newspapers published between 1836 and 1922. Chronicling America , produced by NDNP, is a web-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with information about historic newspapers and images of select pages of some of the newspapers described in the database.  

 

In 2005, NYPL staff began the process of making microfilm of historically-significant newspapers in NYPL’s vast collection accessible through Chronicling America . With National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants awarded in 2005 and 2007, two-hundred thousand pages of newspapers published between 1860-1922 are being digitized and submitted for access through Chronicling America. Digitization of the microfilm is performed by an outside vendor in coordination with the Library’s Preservation, Digital Library and Metadata programs. With NEH funds awarded in 2009 for NDNP Phase III, an additional 100,000 pages of historic newspapers are being digitized.

 

As of June 2009, over 1 million images of pages of historic newspapers, including over 100,000 page images from NYPL’s newspaper collection, were available via Chronicling America . The public can access, tag and comment on select newspaper pages posted on the Library of Congress’ Flickr page.