Grant will expand digital newspaper library

Researchers and fans of old Utah newspapers will have an expanded collection to access beginning next year.

The University of Utah Marriott Library found out Tuesday it will receive $469,514 in federal grant funds that, when combined with $565,857 in matching dollars, will be used to add nearly a quarter-million newspaper pages to an existing digitized collection available at www.digitalnewspapers.org.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services grant will be combined with $100,000 from the U. and about $66,000 from Brigham Young University. The U. will process 240,000 newspaper pages over the next two years — adding them to the nearly 136,000 that already have been digitized — and BYU will digitize about 40,000 pages.

"They (BYU) will house their collection on their server, but our aggregator harvests their metadata so a reader or viewer can come to our site, and it will all be combined there in a virtual sense," said John Herbert, director of the Utah Historical Newspaper project.

The new grant also will allow two other Utah universities to join in, with the four university libraries under the umbrella name of Mountain West Digital Library — a concept Herbert said was developed by Kenning Arlitsch, head of digital technologies for the Marriott library.

"During these two years, the grant will bring Utah State and Southern Utah in and have them start their own small collections. We'll be aggregating everything. The reader will see the combined collection at the digitalnewspapers.org Web site," Herbert said.

The Marriott library has digitized early editions of 20 Utah newspapers, mostly rural weeklies before 1922. The fully searchable site is available for free.

The project in 2001 received $93,000 in Library Services and Technology Act federal funds that was matched by Marriott library funds to kick off the site with about 30,000 pages from three newspapers late last year. A second LSTA grant totaling $282,000 was awarded to the Utah Academic Library Consortium to expand the project by 106,000 pages, including about 40,000 from the predecessors of the Standard-Examiner in Ogden. That grant was matched by funds from the Marriott library, the Weber County Library, the Murray City Library and the Grant County Library.

"We'll form an advisory committee of librarians and historians around the state to advise us and recommend to us the content that we should add to the collection," Herbert said. "We won't make any decisions unilaterally. They know Utah history, libraries and Utah newspapers."