FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Gail Hurley
(860 704-2222)
[email protected]

Date: August 12, 2015

Connecticut State Library Receives New Grant for Newspaper Digitization

The Connecticut State Library is pleased to announce that it has received a supplemental award of $250,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to continue to digitize historically significant Connecticut newspapers through the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) over the next two years. This grant brings the total award amount the State Library has received for the project to $524,034. The digital images will be included in the Library of Congress’ newspaper site: Chronicling America http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

“At a time of limited state resources and increasing citizen interest in accessing Connecticut’s history electronically, this grant award will greatly assist the State Library in its efforts to make more of the historical record available to anyone with Internet access” said State Librarian Kendall Wiggin. Wiggin also noted that it is a tribute to the hard work of the project team that Connecticut has been awarded this second grant.

Following the NDNP guidelines, the grant will allow Connecticut to add another 100,000 pages, digitized from microfilm of newspapers published in the state between 1836 and 1922. An advisory board consisting of an historian, a journalism professor, an educator, a digital content curator, a librarian, and an archivist will select the newspapers to be scanned.

With the earlier NEH grant, the Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (CDNP) https://ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org/ has digitized and made available through Chronicling America the Norwich Bulletin and the Bridgeport Evening Farmer from 1909-1922. http://1.usa.gov/1MGXmtZ. The State Library’s Newspapers of Connecticut site http://cslib.cdmhost.com/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15019coll9 is currently adding newspapers contributed by local libraries and, in time, will incorporate the CDNP newspapers.