Preserving Pre-1923 Colo. Newspapers: Digital Project Wins Grant

From The State of CO: History Colorado is excited to announce that it will continue to help Colorado tell its stories through historic newspapers in an effort made possible by a supplemental grant of $224,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). History Colorado has actively collected, preserved, and provided access to newspapers since 1897, just two decades after the institution’s founding in 1879.

Between 2018 and 2020, the Colorado Digital Newspaper Project will digitize approximately 100,000 pages of pre-1923 Colorado newspapers and make them available for free to the public on the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website.

Since 2016, History Colorado has been digitizing historic Colorado newspapers through the first award of the NEH-NDNP grant. By the end of this year, nearly 100,000 pages from 20 Colorado newspapers will have been scanned from microfilm and made into searchable digital files available through Chronicling America.
The Colorado Digital Newspaper Project has made content available from the African-American publication The Denver Star, later The Statesman; the Denver Jewish Newsand the Jewish Outlook; newspapers from Colorado’s Western Slope like the Delta Independent and Grand Junction’s Daily Sentinel; mining-town news from the Elk Mountain Pilot of Crested Butte; newspapers from towns on the Eastern Plains such as the Bent County Register, later the Lamar Register, and the Cheyenne Record from Cheyenne Wells; as well as the Cañon City Record, La Junta Tribune, Rocky Ford Enterprise, and Ordway New Era. Digitization of the Meeker Herald, the New Era and North Park Union of Walden, the Springfield Herald, and Trinidad’s Chronicle-News as well as the Greeley Tribune, Keota News, and Pueblo Chieftain is currently in production and those pages will be available in the coming months.

The digital newspaper pages have been and will continue to be added to one of Colorado’s best online resources, the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC). A service of the Colorado State Library, CHNC provides access to over 1,100,000 pages of Colorado’s newspapers.

“Colorado's newspapers tell the stories of our communities. These papers cover historic events, but also the little stuff such as announcements of joy over marriages and births, winners of rodeos and high school football games,” says Kerry Baldwin, History Colorado’s Hart Research Library director. “We are grateful to have the opportunity to continue to help our communities access their stories.” Beginning in October 2018, History Colorado will work with an advisory board to identify newspaper titles to be digitized over a two-year period, considering the historical and cultural significance of newspapers in History Colorado’s collection, as well as newspapers that represent Colorado’s ethnic, economic, and geographic diversity that are not yet accessible online.

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