The Nebraska Digital Newspaper Project received new funding of $304,870 for the National Digital Newspaper Program from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the latest round of grant awards.
The national program grants awarded in nine states will support the ongoing digitization of newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 for inclusion in the Library of Congress' online database of historic American newspapers.
Laura Weakly, metadata encoding specialist in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, is the primary investigator for the grant. She works with an advisory board to make important decisions about the project and determine which newspapers are included.
In this grant cycle, the project plans to digitize newspapers from towns on or near Nebraska’s Indian Reservations, as well as from Genoa, Nebraska, which was home to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School from 1884 to 1934. Another focus will be on agriculture newspapers, such as the South Omaha Stockman, and Swedish language newspapers, like the Omaha-posten. They also plan to finish digitizing any of Nebraska’s remaining short-run African American newspaper titles.
“The importance of the project is ensuring that Nebraska newspapers are included in the open source, freely available website at the Library of Congress for use by students, researchers, genealogists and the general public,” Weakly said.
This being the sixth phase means that the CDRH has been able to digitize and provide access to over half a million pages of historic Nebraska newspapers thus far.
“Nebraska’s content is aggregated with all of the other states and so users can see our papers along with results from other states,” Weakly said.
The project is being funded, in part, by the NEH’s special initiative, American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future. The project was selected as one that will help emphasize the role of the humanities in tackling contemporary social challenges: strengthening our democracy, advancing equity for all, and addressing our changing climate.
