Leveraging the Results of NDNP: the Texas Digital Newspaper Program

Today we are talking about how...

The UNT Libraries

The Portal to Texas History

Leveraged

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)

To create

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP)

Background:

The Portal was started in 2002

By Cathy Hartman

To provide a gateway to Texas History

From around the state of Texas

From all types of insititutions

We opened our public site in 2005

And we've been adding content ever since.

From the beginning People

Wanted to digitize newspapers

Every small town in Texas

Wanted to digitize newspapers

When you asked historians, they

Wanted to digitize newspapers

But newspapers are challenging to digitize (at least to do it well)

We said “let us cut our teeth on other things first”

We digitized

Photographs

Negatives

Ledgers

Scrapbooks

Laws

Books

Maps

All sorts of content

It was time to look at newspapers

(It was kind of scary honestly)

But we pushed forward

And in 2007 started working with NDNP

Now we had a standard (The Library of Congress is good at defining standards)

Now we had a vendor

Now we had a workflow

Now we had collaborators Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

We had newspapers coming in

We were happy

But...

NDNP was limited in scope (which makes sense)

Paper of record for a geographical region

(Texas is really big)

(expanded in later years of NDNP)

English language only

Focused on traditional papers

Once people learned we started doing newspapers...

They came a calling

People wanted to digitize their papers.

Small, medium, and large towns

From

In other languages

They wanted to digitize school newspapers

So we had to figure out something

This is all amazing content.

Additionally...

Vendors were going around offering libraries “a great deal”

Digitizing at a very low cost

And low quality

With limited access to only the single institution

Basically locking up the content again

So we got together with our colleagues

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Texas State Library and Archives Commission

To form

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program

TDNP promotes the use of standards

Specifically the Library of Congress standard

It created a workflow to film newspapers.

It created a workflow for depositing master negatives in a vault.

It created a workflow for finding master negatives

It created a program for high quality digitization of newspapers.

We started to work with more institutions around Texas

Some wrote grants to digitize newspapers (through TDNP)

Some funded their projects

Others started raising money

And we started scanning newspapers.

We currently have over 21,000 issues online

Over 70,000 pages of Texas newspapers

From 27 counties (of 254)

Covering from 1829 until 1982

We have 130,000 pages in the queue to upload (ingesting newspapers takes quite a while btw)

We plan to have over 400,000 pages by Fall 2011

The access system for the TDNP newspapers is the Portal to Texas History

Where the content can “play” with other content

Look at the content playing well with other content (isn't that cute)

And totally cool... (you know it is)

So where do we go next?

We want to add new collaborators to TDNP

We want to scan more papers

We want to work with born digital papers (who is collecting those anyway?)

We want over a million pages of newspapers

Freely available

To anyone who wants to user them

Come take a look