The technical guidelines for all awards describe the specific technical requirements for inclusion of digital content in Chronicling America. All specifications must be met for awardees content to be accepted; all data will be verified and reviewed by the Library of Congress.

NDNP supports a consistent technical specification for digital newspaper reproductions and associated metadata in order to maintain parity of services for materials from a variety of institutions and collections and to support the “best practices” of today’s understanding of digital preservation needs.

• Download the Technical Guidelines for the 2020 Awards (PDF, 489 KB)

Profiles and Schemas currently in use

• Image File Format Profiles
  • TIFF v1.9 (PDF, 20 KB)
  • JPEG2000 v2.9 (PDF, 21 KB)
  • PDF v2.4 (PDF, 32 KB)
• OCR File Format Profile
  • OCR v1.18 (PDF, 129 KB)
  • NDNP-ALTO OCR Schema v.2.0
  • See also METS ALTO XML Object Model
• Metadata Elements Dictionary 2020 (PDF, 183 KB)
• XML Templates and Schemas
  • Issue Metadata Template v1.9
  • Reel Metadata Template v1.7
  • Delivery Batch Template v1.6
  • NDNP-ALTO OCR Schema, v.2.0
  • XLINK Schema
• Sample Project Description (how to make use of these Specifications) (PDF, 36 KB)
• Examples of NDNP Digital Assets

To view PDFs

Last Updated: 12/04/2020