National Endowment for the Humanities Grants UMD Libraries $250K to Digitize Historic Newspapers

National Endowment for the Humanities Grants UMD Libraries $250K to Digitize Historic Newspapers

The University of Maryland Libraries received a grant of $250,000 from theNational Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to extend its successful project to digitize historic Maryland newspapers.

The grant was one of only 14 awarded through the NEH’s National Digital Newspaper Program, which grants funds to make the nation's historic newspapers broadly and freely accessible. This is the third such grant the University Libraries have received to support this effort.

Since being awarded its first NEH newspaper grant in 2012, the University of Maryland Libraries have digitized more than 200,000 pages from Baltimore, Hagerstown and Cumberland newspapers, with efforts well under way to represent every region of Maryland. The project has received a total of $865,000 from the NEH.

Project leaders plan to digitize approximately 100,000 newspaper pages over a two-year period. 

Published between 1690 and 1963, the newspapers reflect the political, economic and cultural history of Maryland.  One noteworthy example is the Frostburg Mining Journal, a prominent union publication from western Maryland.

“Support of this program is especially meaningful because it points to a partnership with the Maryland State Archives and Frostburg State University, both of which are providing access to either the newspapers themselves or microfilm copies,” saidBabak Hamidzadeh, Dean of University Libraries. “Together we are able to expand access to these historic documents citizens of the state and researchers around the world.” 

The newspaper project reflects Hamidzadeh’s efforts to showcase the technical know-how of the University Libraries, which are home to information managers, programmers, systems analysts and digitization experts.

“Ongoing support from NEH parallels the increased growth of our digitization program,” said Robin Pike, who manages the digitization and conversion operations throughout the University Libraries. “It is an honor to receive the third grant from this major federal granting agency. We’ve demonstrated that we have the expertise and capacity to continue expanding this project.”

Pike’s staff, sometimes in concert with external vendors, digitize numerous formats including books, posters, archival manuscripts, photographs, slides, negatives and audiovisual media, such as the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange video collection and UMD football films.

The National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between NEH and Library of Congress, is a long-term effort to develop an internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers. The Maryland newspapers are added to a growing collection of more than 10 million digitized newspaper pages freely available to the public at Chronicling America. 

August 18, 2016