Washington State Library Receives Digital Newspaper Grant

Photo: The Jan. 1, 1905 edition of the Lexington, Ky., Blue-Grass Blade from the Library of Congress archives.

The Washington State Library is receiving a National Digital Newspaper Program grant for two years to help it digitize a significant collection of state newspapers.

"No history book tells the story of a community or region the way the local newspaper does," said Deputy State Librarian Marlys Rudeen. "It's all there -- from national crises to lost steers, from political opinions to church socials."

People can use the Internet to access the Washington State Library's Historical Newspapers in Washington's project.

The $341,424 grant will be used to digitize 100,000 pages of Washington state newspapers. The State Library is partnering in the grant with the University of Washington Library, the Seattle Public Library and the Washington State University Library.

The digitized newspapers will be included in the Library of Congress' Web site. This feature is called Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Rudeen mentioned several challenges to transforming historic newspapers into a digital format.

"As many know, newsprint deteriorates quickly," Rudeen said. "Since they are considered to be an ephemeral medium, newspapers often are not printed as carefully as books or magazines. The pages are large, the print is tiny and the ink smudges. Our oldest newspaper in Washington was probably 100 years old before it was microfilmed, so there are lots of stains, faded ink and torn pages.

"Much of the microfilm that the State Library now holds was created 50 years ago, before there were acknowledged standards for microfilming," Rudeen added. "Given the lack of space, very few libraries kept the printed copies of newspapers after microfilm was created."

The Washington State Library is one of six state entities recommended by the National Council in the Humanities to receive funding. The others are the Arizona Department of Libraries, Archives and Public Records; Ohio Historical Society; Pennsylvania State University, main campus; State Historical Society of Missouri; and the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

The National Digital Newspaper Program is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress to provide enhanced access to American newspapers.

According to the NEH, the program will create, over a period of about 20 years, a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all 50 states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress and will be freely accessible via the Internet.