U. Digital Newspapers Program is honored

The University of Utah Digital Newspapers Program has earned an honor from the American Association for State and Local History.

The program earned an AASLH Award of Merit for digitizing Utah's local and state newspapers. The awards recognize achievement in the preservation and interpretation of local, state and regional history. Awards for 2004 represent 102 organizations and individuals from the United States.

Award winners will be honored at a banquet during the AASLH annual meeting in St. Louis on Sept. 30.

The Utah Digital Newspapers program is operated by the U.'s J. Willard Marriott Library, in partnership with Brigham Young University, and contains 200,000 digitized pages from 25 newspapers in 14 Utah counties, printed between 1879 and 1956. The Web site can be accessed at digitalnewspapers.org.

New titles and issues will be loaded constantly over the next two years, the most prominent of which is the first 50 years of the Deseret News (1850-1899). The News will be loaded onto a server at the Lee Library at BYU and then combined electronically with the newspapers already at the U. The result will be a single searchable database, allowing patrons the ease of searching across all the Utah newspapers at once.

The program began in 2002 with state funding, and the newspapers Web site was launched in December 2002 with 30,000 pages from three rural Utah newspapers. A second state grant was awarded for 2003 to expand the program by 106,000 pages, which were released on the site last August.

In 2004 the program is launching yet another expansion that will triple its size. This expansion is funded by a two-year, $1 million federal grant that was awarded to the two universities last September. The federal granting agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, contributed $470,000, with local matching funds from the U. and BYU of $450,000 and $100,000, respectively.