News
September 23, 2003
University of Utah awarded National Leadership Grant for digital newspapers
Salt Lake City, UT: The J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah (U of U) was awarded just over $1 million in federal and local funds to continue their Digital Newspapers Program for two years. In partnership with Brigham Young University (BYU) the funds will be used to add nearly a quarter-million pages to the existing digital newspapers collection at the digitalnewspapers.org website.
The National Leadership Grant was awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) an independent federal agency. IMLS awarded $470,000 and local matching funds came from the U of U and BYU, contributing $450,000 and $100,000 respectively. The 240,000 newspaper pages added over the next two years will bring the total pages in the collection to 376,000.
This grant will allow the U of U, BYU, and two other Utah universities (Utah State University and Southern Utah University) to combine their digital newspaper collections under the Mountain West Digital Library - a concept developed by Kenning Arlitsch, Head of Digital Technologies for the Library. In the MWDL each of the universities runs a CONTENTdm digital collections server to manage its own digital collections as well as support other institutions in its region. "Each institution will house their portion of newspapers on their own server. An aggregating server here at the U. will harvest all the metadata from each location so a user can search and browse a combined collection when they visit the mwdl.org website," Arlitsch said.
In addition to implementing these technological advances, the program will seek input from the community. "We will form an advisory committee of noted historians and librarians from around the state," said John Herbert, the program's director. The Advisory Board will provide input on the grant's major decisions, including the historical content that will be added to the collection.
Another major goal of the grant is to disseminate the program throughout the western U.S. The Marriott Library will organize and administer a training program to several academic institutions in the West to teach them how to launch their own digital newspaper collection. "Our vision is to have the program used as a model for many other libraries, with all the data aggregated into a very large collection," Herbert said.
The program began in 2002 with a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant of $93,000. With that funding, the newspapers website was launched last December with 30,000 pages from three rural Utah newspapers. A second LSTA grant of $278,000 was awarded to the Utah Academic Library Consortium in early 2003 to expand the project by 106,000 pages, mostly from early editions of rural weeklies before 1922. One notable exception is 40,000 pages of the early predecessors of the Ogden Standard Examiner, the first daily newspaper in the collection. This expansion was released on the website on August 1.
The actual digitization process includes digital scanning of microfilm and original newspapers, running optical character recognition software, and loading all the images and text into a database. For this, the U of U utilizes the services of iArchives Inc. from Lindon, Utah, and DiMeMa Inc., a University of Washington spin-off based in Seattle. DiMeMa has developed the CONTENTdm digital collection management software.
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