"There have been a few other pilot projects around the country and the world, but they were very small and they gave up," Arlitsch said. "They couldn't figure out how to do it in a cost-effective way. When we started talking to iArchives and working with them and figured out how to integrate the content into CONTENTdm, we knew we were on to something. Getting full-text searchability, it really propelled us forward."

"There is so much demand for this and the need is so great, once we cracked through the technology, that was the key to the development," Herbert said.

Commercial firms put large newspaper archives online, but they can be accessed only through subscriptions. "We're out here with grant funding, doing this in the public sector," Hebert said.

Nonprofit organizations like libraries have undertaken similar projects, but they result in stand-alone products that can be used only for newspapers. The Marriott library project uses CONTENTdm, which it can apply to other digital collections like photos, books, maps, or video and audio.

The number of unique visits to the online collection jumped from about 23 a day to about 150 after some publicity in July. A national publicity campaign will start later. The future also will feature the Marriott library sharing what it has learned with other institutions across the country.

And the library is hoping to hear soon whether the Institute of Museum and Library Services will provide a third round of funding, which would result in a quarter-million more pages joining the existing online collection. Project officials also hope to someday aggregate search data with other groups that digitize daily or weekly newspapers and find other ways to extrapolate the program nationally.

That would please folks like Steve Diamond of Murray. The retired Salt Lake policeman serves as the department's historian and uses the collection to search for police department history and ancestral information about his father's family from Eureka.

"This was so keen," he said. "You get started and can't leave it alone. I'm up at night checking it and up in the morning checking it. It's a good source of information for me."

Diamond loves the user-friendliness of the collection. Without it, his Eureka research would require accessing files from the town's historical society. "This has saved me months and months and months, having it available on the computer," he said.

Flood, likewise, found the searchable repository "incredible."

Searches reveal that "something that was reported, seen or made news in one area of the country on a particular date, searching on the same topic reveals others. It's like putting a key in a lock to more information."

And, orange Chicago horses notwithstanding, the collection allows anyone to grab a glimpse of life years ago off of Utah's main highways, he said.

"I can sit here at 11 o'clock at night in Bainbridge Island, Wash., and find out a lot of interesting things about Utah."

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E-MAIL: bwallace@desnews.com