Those recommendations likely will be made by year-end, with the processing of the new batch of papers starting in January. The goal is to digitize 12,000 pages each of the next 20 months.

During the third quarter of 2005, the library will administer a three-day training program to 12 academic institutions in the West to teach them how to launch their own digital newspaper collections.

Despite the size of the project, digitizing all archive newspapers in Utah would take some doing.

"We have some ballpark estimates in the 3- to 5-million-page range, so even if we had unlimited funding, it would take us a long time just to process that," Herbert said. "There are so many pages, especially when you get into the dailies. Although we will have 240,000, plus the 136,000 we've already done, that would be about 400,000 total, so we're still just scratching the surface."

For the Marriott library work, Lindon-based iArchives Inc. has scanned and processed the newspaper pages and then moved the data to Seattle, where a company called DiMeMa Inc. uses its CONTENTdm software suite to load the materials into a database that the library puts on its server.

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E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com