Those papers were picked by the director of the library's special collections because they are in three different regions of the state and still exist today. They were available online late last year.

A second LSTA grant of $282,000 awarded to the Utah Academic Library Consortium expanded the project by 106,000 pages, with newspapers selected by a group of Utah historians. About 40,000 pages of the total are from the predecessors of the Standard-Examiner in Ogden, largely because the Weber County Library loaned the project hard copies of the newspaper and contributed project matching funds. Matching money for the second grant also was provided by the Murray City Library and the Grant County Library.

About half of the content from the second batch was digitized from hard copies culled from publishers' basements, public libraries and other folks with a stash of old editions.

The project has focused on pre-1922 newspapers because they are in the public domain — no copyright entanglements — although permission has been gained for some after that period. Early newspapers also were desired because they were facing worse deterioration, either from original paper editions or from microfilm, than their successors.

Lindon-based iArchives Inc. is doing most of the scanning and processing and then ships data to Seattle, where a company called DiMeMa Inc.'s software suite CONTENTdm is used to load the materials into a database that the library puts on its server.

When users start their search, they'll be provided with a list of pages and articles where their search terms can be found. Another click brings up a particular page or article.

DiMeMa, a University of Washington spin-off, creates a PDF file that has text, produced from optical character recognition, imbedded in the page images. Users pull up articles or pages and view the images in Adobe Acrobat. Using the "binoculars" on the toolbar, users can highlight particular search words on the images.

That search ability likely will be a godsend for researchers — genealogy, anyone? — compared with regional newspapers that often lack indexes, cannot be searched and require visiting because their microfilm or hard copies are in centralized locations where only one person at a time can scan them.

Herbert and Kenning Arlitsch, head of digital technologies for the Marriott Library, believe the project may be the first of its type at such a scale by a noncommercial entity.