4 Universities Will Help Digitize Newspapers From the Early 20th Century, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Four universities and two public libraries are sharing $1.9-million in grants to digitize newspapers from the beginning of the 20th century so the publications can be preserved and searched online.

The two-year grants were announced on Monday by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the National Digital Newspaper Project, a new program that will eventually preserve old newspapers from all over the country in digital form.

With the money, each institution will digitize 100,000 or more pages from the most historically significant newspapers published in its state between 1900 and 1910. The digital copies will then be available free on the Library of Congress’s Web site.

The grant recipients and their awards are as follows:

  • Library of Virginia, $201,226.
  • New York Public Library, $351,500.
  • University of California at Riverside, $400,000.
  • University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, $320,959.
  • University of Kentucky Research Foundation, $310,000.
  • University of Utah, $352,693.

The program’s goal is to digitize every historically significant newspaper from every U.S. state and territory from 1836 to 1922. Officials say the entire program will take about 20 years.