The Digital Collections Department at University Libraries has been awarded a National Digital Newspaper Program grant for 2024-2026. The grant, which was awarded to only nine institutions this year, will provide over $300,000 of funding over a two-year period for the digitization and processing of various historical newspapers, the focus of which is environmental justice and historical African American Newspapers.
There are currently 60,175 South Carolina Newspaper Issues in Chronicling America as of September of 2024. From 2022 to 2024, Digital Collections scanned a total of 100,730 pages of newspaper for the project.
The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. The goal of the program is to create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published from 1690 to 1963 from all the states and U.S. jurisdictions. The database is maintained by the Library of Congress and freely available online. This past year Chronicling America users viewed on average 48,152 pages of South Carolina newspapers every month.
“We know that newspapers are a fantastic resource for tracing many facets of life and locale--cultural and political movements, environmental disasters and change, geographic and social landscapes--across time and place,” says Katie Hoskins, Digital Collections Librarian and Co-Principal Investigator of the project. “As we prepared our application, we homed in on gaps in the digital availability of African American, coastal, and agricultural newspapers, and we believe that digitizing this content will enable researchers to better explore the timely and intersecting themes of environmental and social justice.”
A central theme of the program for this grant cycle is environmental history. Therefore, the department’s focus for this period will be newspapers highlighting environmental justice in conjunction with preserving historical African American newspapers. “Working with the Charleston Library Society, our goal is to select titles linking environmental history with social justice in South Carolina,” says Craig Keeney, Cataloging Librarian at the South Caroliniana Library and Co-Principal Investigator of the project.
“University of South Carolina's longstanding commitment to collecting and preserving SC newspapers means our team has access to thousands of physical and microfilmed issues documenting centuries of local history from across the state. The NDNP grant from NEH is critical to our mission of providing access to these valuable primary sources for the people of South Carolina and beyond,” Hoskins says.
The Digital Collections department scans rare, unique, and fragile items held by University Libraries and publishes them online for researchers on campus and around the world. Every effort is made to portray true color and likeness without any editing. All items are described, many can be downloaded, and all can be cited in scholars' research. Explore and learn more about University Libraries Digital Collections on their website.