UNT @the 2023 National Digital Newspaper Program Meeting

Jefferson Building, September 21, 2023

Posted by & filed under Events, Featured, Grants, National Digital Newspaper Program.

During the week of September 18, 2023, Ana Krahmer and Tim Gieringer from UNT Libraries’ Digital Newspaper Unt represented UNT in the 2023 National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) annual meeting, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This annual meeting is an opportunity for NEH awardees to discuss strategies for preserving newspapers on a national level and to compare their processes at the state level. This meeting also represents one of only a handful of annual gatherings where people from across the U.S. who work in newspaper preservation can meet to chat about what they do. In September 2023, UNT was awarded for a seventh cycle to participate in NDNP, placing Texas alongside Florida, Minnesota, and Virginia, as the only states chosen for seven awards thus far.

Tim Gieringer presented about taking over project management midway through the two-year grant cycle. Tim’s Tim Gieringer presents to the 2023 National Digital Newspaper Program annual meetingpresentation focused on his experiences over the last several months as he has learned about NDNP processes, and it offered tips for any participants who may need to prepare to hand over a project in the future. In particular, Tim focused on creating and maintaining project documentation, sharing what he and Sarah Lynn Fisher, the former NDNP-Texas project manager, have created. Other conference attendees offered several good suggestions and comments that we will explore implementing into our workflow in the UNT Newspaper Unit. Also during this annual meeting, Tim was also able to meet with and receive additional training for new and re-starting project members from Library of Congress and NEH staff. 

Ana Krahmer presented about her committee work this past year in developing the Race & Ethnicity Keyword Thesaurus for Chronicling America, freely available through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Edsitement education site. This thesaurus, published last year by the committee, is intended to help scholars contextualize their language in researching civil rights and communities, using historic terms to locate more relevant information.  This past year, the committee worked on framing the terms according to how internal group members used them in comparison to how external people, unaffiliated with the given group, used those terms.  This resulted in an “Insider/Outsider Usage” section added to all keywords in the thesaurus, with examples from newspapers in Chronicling America serving as primary source evidence for this usage.

As one of only four state institutions awarded seven times by the NEH, UNT has enjoyed a long history working with the National Digital Newspaper Program, and the opportunity to learn what other states do in newspaper preservation is something we look forward to every year. NDNP, “a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to provide permanent access to a national digital resource of newspaper bibliographic information and historic newspapers, selected and digitized by NEH-funded institutions (awardees) from all U.S.” The collection NDNP has built on Chronicling America represents all 50 United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Comprising over 20 million pages of news content, ChronAm is a rich, free resource for anyone interested in historical and genealogical research. 

The Portal to Texas History at the GLO’s Save Texas History Symposium

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The Cathy Nelson Hartman Portal to Texas History Endowment was happy to sponsor and host a booth at the Save Texas History Symposium, From San Fernando de Bexar to “The Alamo City:” San Antonio and its History. The symposium was presented by the Texas General Land Office at the Historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio on September 22nd and 23rd and covered history of the San Antonio area from the 18th century to the early 20th century. We got to see many friends of the Portal and had the opportunity to make many more friends. 

National Endowment for the Humanities Awards UNT Libraries for a Seventh Round of the National Digital Newspaper Program

2023 NEH Award Icon

Posted by & filed under Featured, General, Grants, National Digital Newspaper Program, Texas Digital Newspaper Program.

Awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to UNT Libraries, a seventh grant round, awarded on 9/1/2023 in the amount of $203,140, will span two years and support addition of 100,000 more Texas newspaper pages to Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’ national repository for U.S. newspapers.  Texas will add titles from south- and border-Texas cities, including San Antonio, Laredo, and El Paso, with the goal of expanding more titles and years of newspapers that tell the stories of underrepresented Texans, supportive of bridging the communities in ways indicated by NEH Chair Shelly Lowe’s statements from the 2022 National Digital Newspaper Program Annual Meeting, as we endeavor to “balance difference of viewpoint, heritage, and include parallel and unknown histories in our narrative” (Lowe 2022).  

In addition to adding the newspapers to Chronicling America, where Texas identity can be preserved in the context of other state newspapers, we will also add these newspapers to  the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP), on The Portal to Texas History. All of the newspapers available in Chronicling America and TDNP are freely accessible and can be used broadly for activities including research and education. As a result, we try continually to inform teachers and students about the importance of newspapers as windows into history.

Chronicling America is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress in an effort to build a nationwide, open-access repository of digitized historic newspapers.

To learn more about Chronicling America, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, visit their additional resources! 

 

 

University of North Texas Libraries Receives FY24 TexTreasures Award!

Posted by & filed under General, Grants, Texas Digital Newspaper Program, TexTreasures.

The TexTreasures Competitive Grant Program is awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through funds received from the Library Services and Technology Act. Drs. Ana Krahmer and Mark Phillips have received an FY24 TexTreasures grant of $39,998, to fill in newspaper gaps relating to the history of underrepresented Houston communities, including: 

  • The Houston Informer, the city’s African American paper, advocating for advancing the civil rights of both the Houston and wider southern African American community.  Currently, The Portal to Texas History hosts 100 issues from 1919 to 1924, and this grant will extend coverage up to 1931. 
  • The Jewish Herald-Voice, a Houston-based newspaper published for and by the Jewish community in Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast, currently is available up to 1979 on the Portal, and this grant will fund completion of the next 30 years, up to 2009. 
  • The South Belt-Ellington Leader, a newspaper published by women, self-described as “housewives,” (“Leader History”) living and working in the South Belt area. The Leader has served the community as a watchdog newspaper to protect citizen safety and health since 1976.  

TexTreasures is an annual competitive grant program designed to help member libraries make their special collections more accessible to researchers across Texas and beyond. For further information about this award and recipients, visit the TexTreasures Recipients page.

Texas State Library and Archives Commission Logo Institute of Museum and Library Services Logo Texas Digital Newspaper Program Collection Logo

 

Rescuing Texas History, 2023 Awards Announcement

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This past May, The Portal to Texas History announced its most recent call for submissions for the 2023 Rescuing Texas History program. This is the fifteenth year of the program, which has brought to light over 77,000 items from 438 projects. Since the beginning of the program there have been over 17 million uses of materials hosted on The Portal to Texas History that were received in response to past call for submissions.

Each selected project is provided with up to $1,000 of digitization services and the materials come from libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other groups (including individuals) that house historical materials.

We are thrilled to announce this year’s awardees!
Congratulations to:

Badge of Pride, LLC History Committee of Clear Lake Shores Civic Club Remembering Black Dallas Private Collection of TB Willis
Private Collection of the Ritchie Family Bosque Museum Private Collection of Dr. Rudy Rodriguez Private Collection of Dr. George E Keaton, Jr.
Fort Worth Jewish Archives City of Galveston Brownsville Historical Association White Rock Chapel of Addison, Inc.
Private Collection of Jim Mahoney Tarrant County Archives Texarkana Museum System African American Library in Bell County
Mesquite Public Library Riesel Historical Society Cooke County Library Heritage Society at Sam Houston Park