The Indiana State Library will host a public program on Friday, July 13 featuring Ms. Deborah Thomas, the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) coordinator for the Library of Congress. Ms. Thomas will discuss the Chronicling America website and the importance of digitizing and preserving historic newspapers published in Indiana. The presentation will take place at the State Library at 315 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis, in the History Reference room from 10:30 AM to noon (EDT).

Indiana is one of twenty-nine states currently participating in the NDNP program. The Indiana State Library, in partnership with the Indiana Historical Society, is digitizing a selection of Indiana’s historically significant newspapers as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) NDNP grant. Newspapers digitized as part of this two-year project will be included in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website, which provides access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. The NDNP is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.

This program is worth two (2) Technology Library Education Units toward public librarian certification. Please contact Indiana NDNP project manager Chris Ittenbach at cittenbach@library.in.gov or (317) 234-8153 if you are interested in attending the program. Visit either the project wiki (http://208.119.72.66/digiwiki) to monitor the Indiana NDNP project and receive real-time project status reports.