This post was contributed by Carolina Hernandez (left), Journalism and Communication Librarian, and Sarah Seymore (right), Digital Collections Metadata Librarian, at the University of Oregon Libraries.
Starting in 2009 with a National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) grant, the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP) at the University of Oregon Libraries has digitized historic newspaper content from across the state for the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. The website, which is based on chronam, the Django application that the Library of Congress uses to make its Chronicling America website, is freely available to the public through a keyword-searchable online database. Starting in 2015, we began accepting and hosting current born-digital Oregon newspapers from participating publishers, and we continue to add digitized microfilm of historic newspapers every year.
We have just launched an updated website that makes it even easier to search through more than 800,000 pages of Oregon newspapers. These changes are possible with the upgrade to the community developed and supported Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open-ONI) software.
The new system now allows for more avenues of access beyond keyword searching, including the ability to browse all issues by date (Calendar) and an interactive map for browsing by location (Map). We have also added a “This Day in History” feature to the main page, which highlights the front page of a random newspaper from that day in history.
