University of Florida: $1.2 Million Digitization Project Expands Access to Newspapers in Florida and the Caribbean

From Smathers Libraries/U. of Florida:

The Florida & Puerto Rico Digital Newspaper Project (FPRDNP) has officially come to an end. A collaborative $923,000 project between the University of Florida (UF) George A. Smathers Libraries and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR-RP) library system, the FPRDNP has provided access to hundreds of digitized pages of historic newspapers from Florida and Puerto Rico that were previously found only on microfilm.

From 2013 to 2019, the project has provided access to more than 300,000 pages of newspapers from 14 newspaper titles published in Florida and four newspaper titles from Puerto Rico. The Pensacola Journal, the Daytona Daily News, the Florida Agriculturist, the Key West Citizen, Gaceta de Puerto Rico, and La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico are among the publications now available to the public.

Though the FPRNDP has ended, newspaper digitization efforts for the state and its Caribbean partners continue. In August 2019, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the UF Libraries $309,000 (bringing the project total to over $1.2million) to continue its digitization efforts alongside UPR-RP under the US Caribbean & Ethnic Florida Newspaper Project (USCFNP). This new collaborative project builds on the efforts of the FPRDNP to continue digitizing historic newspapers from the territory and state, with a focus on digitizing ethnic newspapers from Florida. The USCFNP also expands the scope of the FPRDNP to include digitization of historic newspapers published in the Virgin Islands with the help from a new partner, the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI).

The USCFNP will run from September 2019 to August 2021. All digitized content will be text-searchable and freely accessible in Chronicling America (www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), a site created and maintained by the Library of Congress for the National Digital Newspaper Program, as well as via the Florida Digital Newspaper Library (https://ufdc.ufl.edu/fdnl) and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (https://dloc.com)

To view previously digitized content, visit Chronicling America and the UF Digital Collections (https://ufdc.ufl.edu/ufndnp). For more information about the project visit www.ufndnp.wordpress.com

Filed under: Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News