# Presentation: 194294

## The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP)

- An NEH/LC Collaborative Program
*Enhancing access to historical newspapers*
- Release: September 2006

## NDNP Mission 

- Enhance access to all American newspapers
- Improve access to products of United States Newspaper Program (USNP) using current technologies
- Establish standards and “best practices” for newspaper digital reformatting and access
- Use multi-phased approach for research and scaled development
- Develop geographically-diverse program that benefits all US communities

## Why Newspapers?

- Newspapers: a unique resource for understanding the fundamentals of history
- Democracy, free press, diverse geographic viewpoints at the community level
- Enormous corpus of newspapers presents an archival challenge
- Text-intensive layout is labor-intensive to search without reference tools
- Digitization of microfilmed corpus economically feasible

## Why a National Effort?

- Voluminous, distributed collections
- No one institution holds the “master collection”
- Broad user-base for newspaper material
- Think nationally, select locally
- Comprehensive chronological coverage, eventually
- Need for leadership to build on past national efforts (USNP)

## LC’s Historical Newspaper Activities

- 20-year NEH/LC collaboration of USNP
- Existing national network of cooperative programs
- Standards established for preservation microfilm
- Standards established for descriptive metadata/ cataloging
- American Memory’s “Stars and Stripes”
- _[http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sgphtml/sashtml/sashome.html](http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sgphtml/sashtml/sashome.html)_
- Proof-of-concept for historical newspaper format and description

## What will NDNP Produce?

- Web access to
- National directory of US newspaper holdings (what, when, where) – based on USNP legacy data
- More than 30 million page images of historical newspapers digitized primarily from microfilm, with full-text
- Historical context of newspaper, printing tech, etc
- Depository of duplicate digitized microfilm at LC

## How?

- Multi-partner program
- NEH: Funds the program (“We the People” initiative)
- LC: Aggregates, preserves and serves
- Awardees: Selects and converts
- Phase I – FY04-FY06 (Test bed)
- NEH awardees (up to 10) with existing digital collections infrastructure and master microfilm negatives
- 100,000 pages each + 100,000 LC pages by 2007 (from 1900-1910)
- Microfilm reel analysis for research

- Phase I Timeline
- 	2004
- July – NEH cooperative agreement guidelines issued, LC technical architecture under development
- October – Application deadline; 15 applications received
- 	2005
- April – NEH Awards announced
- 	2006
- September – NDNP application publicly available via Web

## NDNP, September 2006 

- Web access - *American Chronicle*
- Newspaper Title Directory, 1693-present
- Full-text of content w/in visual newspaper layout (page-level access)
- Contextual historical material (Encyclopedia)
- Converted content from all awardees
- Initial time period covered: 1900-1910

## Newspaper Title Directory

- Re-use of CONSER and Newspaper Union List, created under USNP (maintained by OCLC)
- 147,000 newspaper titles
- 900,000 holdings records
- Searchable, Web access to all USNP-collected data, tied to digitized issues when available, as well as external newspaper Web sites

## Full Text with Page-level Access

- Preserves integrity of primary historical content, text in context
- Minimal metadata required to achieve reasonable search results
- Economics of large-scale, large-format digitization
- Allows creation of substantial content-base for research and development on additional search strategies and technologies

## Digital Asset Specifications

- Page Image - grayscale, 400 dpi, from microfilm
- TIFF 6.0; JPEG 2000 (.jp2); PDF with Hidden Text
- OCR
- XML – NDNP/ALTO Schema
- Page-level, uncorrected, column zones with “bounding box” mapping coordinates
- Metadata
- XML in METS/MODS for digital objects

## Historical Context

- An Encyclopedia of Newspaper History
- Brief essays for each title digitized
- Publisher, geography, significant events covered, audience/community, politics
- History of each participating state and the role of newspapers in its history
- Presentations for technology developments, significant people, places, etc

- Future Phases: 2007-2024
- Addition of new partners (continuation of Phase I test bed, to represent all 54 states and territories)
- Increased efficiency in workflows, tools, technology,  sustainable resources
- Additional access capabilities, improved technology

**Aggregate ~ Preserve ~ Serve**

- For more information, contact _[ndnp@loc.gov](mailto:ndnp@loc.gov)_
- Georgia Higley
- Head, Newspaper Section
- Serials and Government Publications Division
- Library of Congress
- _[ghig@loc.gov](mailto:ghig@loc.gov)_
- http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/