A new Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership grant will enable the Center for Research Libraries to gather and disseminate information about U.S. and foreign newspapers that are preserved in print, microform, and digital formats.
Many research libraries are moving rapidly from building and maintaining newspaper collections in print and microform in favor of providing electronic access to titles through vendors. Hard copy newspapers are being preserved only by CRL and a relative handful of major research libraries, such as the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Harvard, and others. IMLS recently awarded funding for a two-year CRL project to create a single database of information about the holdings of these newspaper collections of record, and to expose metadata on historic newspapers and their digital versions included in major open access and commercial databases and digital repositories.
The project will build upon the work of the International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) preservation database, which aggregates information about non-U.S. newspapers held in microform and paper formats by certain major libraries. The project will enable CRL to expand that information to register holdings of U.S. and foreign newspapers and to track digital copies as well. The ability to handle this kind of data will eventually be built into the PAPR registry PAPR registry, now being developed to aggregate print archive holdings for serials by CRL in cooperation with the California Digital Library.
Work on the project is currently underway with significant in-kind support from CRL and the American Antiquarian Society.
For more information, contact Amy Wood, Director of Technical Services, 773-955-4545 ext. 327; awood@crl.edu.