More Than a Century of Digitized Newspapers from Across Georgia Added to Free Online Portal

From the Georgia Public Library Service/Digital Library of Georgia:

Georgia Public Library Service and the Digital Library of Georgia are pleased to announce the addition of nearly 60,000 pages of newspapers dating from 1882-1985 to the Georgia Historic Newspapers portal. The portal is the largest provider of free online access to digitized licensed and public domain Georgia newspapers, and currently includes titles dating from 1763-2018.

Consisting of nine titles and over 7,800 issues covering Chattooga, Hart, Early, Miller, Richmond, and Seminole counties, these latest digital collections provide historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date, city, county, and type. This project marks the first time newspapers from Miller and Seminole counties, located in extreme southwest Georgia, are included in the portal.

Of particular interest from Richmond county are two late 20th century historically Black newspapers, the News-Review (1971-1972) and the Augusta News-Review (1972-1985). These titles are significant in their coverage of issues affecting the African American community in the Central Savannah River Area. Earlier this year, the May 27, 1976, issue of the Augusta News-Review became the two millionth page to be added to the Georgia Historic Newspapers portal.

“The digitization of the Augusta News-Review is historically important because it provides primary sources for information on Augusta’s Black community at a time when there were few alternatives,” said Dr. Mallory Millender, owner and publisher of the Augusta News-Review. “When the News-Review started, white owned media generally didn’t cover Augusta’s Black community. With digitization, researchers, or anyone with a library card and access to a computer, can access every item ever printed in the News-Review – free.”

Issues are freely available online through Georgia Historic Newspapers, which utilizes the Library of Congress’ open source tool, Chronicling America, for online delivery.

Georgia Public Library Service supports the mission of the Georgia Historic Newspapers portal to preserve and make Georgia’s newspapers easily and freely accessible online. For older newspapers, this involves funding for digitization; but for more current papers, the goal is to partner with publishers to make born-digital newspapers freely accessible after an agreed-upon embargo period. GPLS and the Digital Library of Georgia respect publishers’ copyright, and only makes those issues in the public domain or those for which they have publisher permission available online.

Annually, the Digital Library of Georgia digitizes over 100,000 historic newspaper pages in accordance with technical guidelines developed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress for the National Digital Newspaper Program.

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