This month, Chronicling America reached 17 million newspaper pages! Historic newspaper pages are contributed to the Chronicling America newspaper database by National Digital Newspaper Program partner organizations from all across the country. The Historic Maryland Newspapers Project at University of Maryland Libraries is the Maryland state awardee of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress.
As the Maryland state partner of NDNP, the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project works with UMD Special Collections and University Archives; an advisory board of local historians, archivists, librarians, and educators; and content contributors from throughout the state to digitize historic Maryland newspapers. Digitized news pages are shared with the Library of Congress and included in Chronicling America, a newspaper database resulting from the NDNP partnership that holds titles from 48 states and 2 territories. To find out more read an earlier blog post on how to use Chronicling America, and browse links to all of the Maryland newspaper titles currently in Chronicling America.
Maryland has been a part of NDNP since 2012 and will have contributed over 400,000 newspaper pages by the end of the year with 100,000 more coming in the next two years. We have just started our 5th two year grant phase and are incredibly grateful to have received this additional NDNP award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This Fall, our remaining Phase 4 newspaper titles will be added to Chronicling America, and our advisory board will help us finalize our title selection for Phase 5. Stay up-to-date on the project’s progress on the “Stew of the Month” posts on the Digistew blog and follow us on social media @HistoricMDNews on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interesting historic news content.
Maryland independent. [volume] (Port Tobacco, Md.), 26 Sept. 1884. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025407/1884-09-26/ed-1/seq-1/
This is the first post in a new monthly guest blog post series on the Special Collections and University Archives blog featuring the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project (HMNP) and newspapers from Chronicling America. The HMNP team is comprised of Co-Directors, Doug McElrath (Director, Special Collections and University Archives) and Robin Pike (Manager, Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting); Project Manager, Pam McClanahan (Digital Projects Librarian); and three student assistants this semester – Bryanna Bauer, Sarah McKenna, and Alexis Woolford (MLIS candidates, UMD iSchool).
Stay tuned for next month’s Halloween themed post from our team, and check out Bryanna and Sarah’s recent post on women’s suffrage in the newspapers and celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment on social media!
Pamela A. McClanahan is the Digital Projects Librarian in the Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting department of UMD Libraries and an alum of the UMD iSchool where she earned her MLS degree specializing in Archives, Records and Information Management. McClanahan was a 2017 National Digital Stewardship Resident at Smithsonian Libraries and holds a BA in History from Hood College. In her role at UMD Libraries, she manages grant-funded digitization projects of University collections and the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project.
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