In partnership with the University of Oregon Libraries, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) received a Research Development tier II grant of $346,391 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support their Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open ONI). Getting the Latest Scoop: A New Tool to Expand Access to Online Newspaper Collections was one of 208 humanities projects supported across the country by the NEH.
The grant will assist in the development of a software tool that will expand the reach of Open ONI, a community-maintained and open-source software project to make historic American newspapers browsable and searchable on the web. The software also allows for increased accessibility to serial publications of various formats, including non-standard newsletters, short-lived newspapers, PDFs and born-digital publications.
Open ONI will assist libraries, archives, historical societies, and other cultural heritage institutions to display newspaper pages in an easier, more affordable way, and with an improved user experience. Most importantly, this project allows for preservation of more inclusive content, such as publications from small communities or under-represented groups.
The collaboration between Oregon and Nebraska builds on the work of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the NEH, the Library of Congress, and state projects to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers published between 1789 and 1963.
Karin Dalziel, digital development manager & designer, Laura Weakly, metadata encoding specialist, and Greg Tunink, programmer/analyst, are CDRH staff members who will be working on this project and are excited about the potential benefits for researchers and Nebraskans.
According to Tunink, Open ONI previously has focused on older NDNP newspapers, but this project will improve working with PDFs, which most non-NDNP digitization efforts use rather than digitizing to the formats Open ONI has historically required. Modern newspapers and born-digital publications also largely use PDFs. Making inclusion in Open ONI sites easier will be a significant improvement.
Ultimately, millions of pages of publications could be made accessible, filling the gap by other NDNP projects and “Beyond NDNP.” Researchers benefit from the ability to do large-scale data analysis and manipulation across repositories.
“The enhancement of the Open ONI software will help our team put more newspapers into the Nebraska Newspapers portal,” said Dalziel.
The CDRH has been a participant in the NDNP since 2007 making 491,175 newspaper pages available through Chronicling America, a freely available full-text database at the Library on Congress. In addition, 136,784 pages considered to be "Beyond NDNP" such as the Daily Nebraskan and many Czech-language newspapers are available on the Nebraska Newspapers website.