New Mexico newspapers going digital

The College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences and the Center for Southwest Research have received a $220,000 grant to digitize 100,000 New Mexico newspaper pages.

The project is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, which is working to create a national searchable database of historically significant U.S. newspapers published between 1836 and 1922, said Paula Wasley, public affairs specialist at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The database is available at the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America.

Kathlene Ferris, CSWR digital programs manager, said this is the third newspaper digitization grant to be awarded to the library by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The newly digitized pages will be added to the 200,000 already available online.

“We digitize the newspapers from microfilm. We send it to a vendor who actually does the digitizing and they do the (Optical Character Recognition) so that it’s word-searchable,” Ferris said.

At UNM, they also write essays describing the history of each newspaper chosen for digitization, Ferris said.

The project’s advisory board has encouraged broad geographic coverage of New Mexico, according to a UNM press release. Newspapers from Farmington, Carlsbad, Clayton, Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Albuquerque have already been made available on Chronicling America. Older newspapers from former mining towns such as White Oaks and Cerrillos are also available.

For the past four years the project has only worked to digitize microfilm stored by UNM, Ferris said. However, the New Mexico State Library in Santa Fe is offering use of their microfilm for the next portion of the project. Issues of newspapers posted on the CSWR website will also be digitized.

“There are 69 newspapers that are finished. We have 10 more being worked on we’ll be maybe getting an additional 10 in the last two years from all over the state. We look for newspapers of record for each county,” Ferris said. “Those were the newspapers that usually had legal notices and they are important to include in the process.”

Marielle Dent is a freelance reporter for The Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at mdent@unm.edu or on Twitter @Marielle_Dent.