More than 79,000 newly digitized newspaper pages, along with several new site features, have recently been added to the Chronicling America Web site. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 500,000 digitized newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, and representing 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia.
Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NDNP is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of public-domain U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages, as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH’s “We the People” program, this rich digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.
The Web site was launched in March 2007 with 226,000 newspaper pages. (See Information Bulletin, April 2007.)
New features on the site include:
- “See All Available Newspapers” page. A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site.
- RSS feed and e-mail update service. Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery at www/loc.gov/rss/ (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.
During the next 20 years, NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all the states and U.S. territories.
Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all types of formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program. The Library of Congress is also digitizing and contributing to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership.