We’ve recently added some new content to Hoosier State Chronicles, pushing our page count to over 189,000 pages.  The newest addition is the Evansville Daily Journal from 1848-1859.  More Evansville issues will be added in the coming months.  We also added more issues of the South Bend News-Times up through the end of public domain in 1922.

Here’s a recent South Bend Tribune story about our project and other newspaper digitization efforts in the state: Online access to historic newspapers is growing – South Bend Tribune: Local.

Just in time for Christmas we have a lot of new digitized newspaper content available for you!

We recently uploaded another 23,000 pages into Hoosier State Chronicles including over 10,000 pages from the South Bend News-Times, and new Indianapolis Journal content from 1893-95.

As a special present for Hoosiers, any Indiana resident can now access over 400,000 pages of digitized Indiana newspapers via a special agreement with Newspapers.com.  To access the content follow these instructions:

1. Go to INSPIRE.in.gov .  If you try accessing INSPIRE at an Indiana library you shouldn’t need to log-in.  However, if you try accessing INSPIRE via your home, coffee shop, work place, etc. you will need to create a log-in.  Again, if you are an Indiana resident access to the select content is free via INSPIRE.

2. Once you are into INSPIRE, click on the Newspapers link, which will give you several options for digitized newspaper content.

3. To access the select 400,000 pages via Newspapers.com, click on the Newspapers.com link.

In the coming year, the Indiana content on Newspapers.com is expected to grow at a rate of 50,000 pages a month!

Didn’t I promise you a GREAT Christmas present?

We recently uploaded another 30,000 pages of digitized Indiana newspapers to our collection.  The additions include the Indianapolis Journal from May 1888-April 1893, the South Bend News-Times from July 1913-October 1915, and the Vevay Times and Switzerland County Democrat for 1840.

A National Digital Newspaper Program grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in cooperation with the Library of Congress, funded the creation of most of this content.

In the next few months we’ll upload more of the South Bend News-Times through 1922.  We are also currently working to add issues of the Vevay Weekly Reveille from 1853-1901.

The following announcement is from the Library of Congress:

8 Million Pages Now Online and 2 New States Joining NDNP!

 The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a joint program of the Library of Congress (LC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has passed several exciting milestones recently. More than 8 million historic newspaper pages, published in 32 states and the District of Columbia between 1836 and 1922, are now available through the Chronicling America web site, hosted by LC, and in July, the NEH announced two new partners joining the program this year. Awards were made to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the South Dakota Department of Tourism and State Development to digitize newspapers from Nevada and South Dakota. This brings the number of participants in the program to 39, including 37 states, one territory, and the District of Columbia. NEH and the LC aim to have every state and U.S. territory represented in Chronicling America (see http://www.neh.gov/divisions/preservation/grant-news/nevada-and-south-dakota-join-the-national-digital-newspaper-progra for more information). In addition, supplementary awards have been made to eight state partners already participating in the program….Read more about it!

If you follow this blog, or use the resources linked on this blog, you may be wondering why there has not been much blog activity in the past few months.  Although the blog has been relatively silent, we’ve been busy behind the scenes working on content.  Here are a few things to look forward to by the end of 2014.

The last two of our batches from the 2011-13 grant were accepted by the Library of Congress (LC) today.  Once they’ve been ingested into Chronicling America, and once LC has received the duplicate master microfilm, then all the deliverables for the grant can be checked off. Once that’s done, we can move forward with submitting new data funded by the 2013-15 NDNP NEH grant.  Currently I have around 40,000 processed, digital newspaper pages sitting on my desk that are ready to submit once LC gives the okay.  The titles and dates selected for the new grant are the South Bend News-Times (1913-22), the Evansville Journal (1843-70), the Vincennes Western Sun & General Advertiser  (1835-49), and continuing from the previous grant, more issues of the Indianapolis Journal (1888-93).

We also hope to migrate some of the Indiana Memory newspapers collections that are currently displayed in CONTENTdm into our Veridian software at newspapers.library.in.gov over the next few months.  First up is the Evansville Argus.

We also have new software that will allow us to process some titles in house.  Titles that we’ll process in house are some which were previously scanned but not OCRed.  The best example being a collection of Vevay, Indiana newspapers that Switzerland County High School scanned and posted on their old school website.  We plan to OCR these scans and ingest them into Veridian which will make them keyword searchable.

Stay tuned…