By Natasha Hollenbach, Digital Projects Librarian
Last August, we were awarded a fourth NDNP grant, and with
this blog post, we’re announcing which titles and date ranges have been
selected and giving you a little behind-the-scenes of the selection process.
First some NDNP basics. NDNP stands for the National Digital
Newspaper Program. It is funded through the National Endowment for the
Humanities; but, the content is hosted by the Library of Congress on the Chronicling
America website. Each grant cycle is 2 years and should produce
about 100,000 pages.
One hundred thousand pages sounds like a lot, until you actually
try to select titles and date ranges. When we were putting together our
application, we needed a focus, a reason why NEH should approve our proposal. Since our last grant, the accepted date range has expanded from 1836-1922 to 1690-1963,
so we knew we wanted to choose content after 1922, but what? We decided to focus
on booms and busts in the mining, logging, agriculture and oil industries.
Consider that for a moment, four major industries across the entire state over
four decades, which include the Great Depression and WWII, in 100,000 pages!
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| Geographic distribution of selected newspapers this round |
At this point the selection committee became my lifeline. We
had a meeting in November 2018. They gave me a list of titles with date ranges
that they thought would accomplish our goals. However, many of those titles
were suggested with a 20 or 30-year date range. I had to look at these titles
on microfilm, and if you’ve ever tried to look at a long date range of
newspapers on microfilm you know how challenging and time consuming that is. Here
are a few factors that I considered.
The Microfilm Itself:
The quality of the digital image is dependent on the quality
of the microfilm image, which in turn is dependent on how it was microfilmed and, on the quality of the print pages it was created from. It’s also
important to keep in mind that when the microfilm is digitized, the settings are determined for the whole reel, not for individual pages. When you see digitized newspaper
pages that are too light or dark to read, are partially covered by the next
page, or have random ink blots, those problems were on the microfilm.
Content - % of Local/State Coverage:
Obviously, priority goes to newspapers that have higher
percentages of local and state coverage, but what counts as local or state
coverage? Much of the state coverage comes from regular columns that you see in
newspapers across the state or, from reprinted articles for other Montana
newspapers. What I focus on more is how much of the issue is local. Columns titled
“Local News”, “About Town”, or any news that comes from surrounding communities
are what I look for. Are they covering the county commissioners’ meetings? Are
they publishing obituaries? Do they talk about the local schools? And, for this
grant in particular, are they covering one of the industries we’re interested in? For
example, in an agricultural community are they providing advise from the
extension service, information about crop prices, and legislation that will
affect farmers? If the paper is overwhelmingly concerned with national or
international news from the AP and doesn’t tie these events back to Montana, it
won’t be selected.
Content – Copyright:
For published materials including newspapers, anything
published in 1923 or earlier is in the public domain. From 1924-1963, a
newspaper might be in the public domain. (In order to still be under copyright,
they had to register the copyright for each issue and then renew the copyright
28 years later.) I have yet to find a Montana newspaper that went through the
trouble of copyrighting. However, during
this period, newspapers published things like comics and fiction that
potentially has its own copyright. Therefore, another selection question is how
much copyrighted material is in each issue? We decided early on that we wanted to
include the Producers News, a socialist newspaper out of Plentywood. But, we
also wanted to pick another paper from the area for that same time period in
order to compare and contrast political positions of the time. The committee
suggested the Daniels County Leader; however, over half of each issue was
copyrighted material. The thing about copyrighted material isn’t just that it’s
copyrighted, making it a potential legal issue. If there is a high percentage
of that, then, there’s probably not enough local and state content. The Plentywood Herald was chosen instead.
Page Count:
Here’s a little newspaper math for you. The page count for a
year’s worth of an 8-page weekly is 416 pages. A year’s worth of an 8-page
paper published 6 days a week is 2,504 pages. Unfortunately, daily papers tend
to have more pages per issue and, they also include a lot more non-local and
state content; such as, a full sports page, a society section, a fashion
section, and so on. This is why there are few daily Montana papers on
Chronicling America and the few included have very short date ranges. While we
didn’t choose any daily papers this time around, we are including the Montana
Farmer-Stockman which was published twice a month, the shortest issue having 28
pages. We’re also doing an extended run of it (1948-1963), which is unusual for
such a high page count paper. The difference is that this paper pulls content, and
highlights people, from across the state, as opposed to covering the news of just one town.
Now that you know a little more about the process, here is
the list of titles that have recently been chosen.
Belt Valley Times (Oct 1921-1926)
Bozeman Courier (1921-1927)
Montana Labor News (1932-1951)
Circle Banner (Nov 1914-1924, 1921 and 1/2
of 1922 missing)
Columbian/Hungry Horse News (Aug 1946-1955)
Eureka Mirror (Mar 1932-Nov 1936)
The Fort Peck Press (Aug 1934-May 1937)
Glasgow Courier (1942-1945)
Montana Oil Journal/Montana Oil and Mining
Journal (1931-1946)
Montana Farmer-Stockman (1948-1963)
The People’s Voice (Dec 1939-1963)
The Kevin Courier/The Montana Courier/The
Kevin Review (May 1922-Jun 1929)
Laurel Outlook (1944-1950)
Western News and the Libby Times/Western
News (1929-1949)
The Producers News (1928-Mar 1937)
Plentywood Herald (1927-1936)
Carbon County Chronicle/Carbon County
News/Red Lodge daily news combined with Carbon County News/Carbon County News
(1924-Jul 1945)
The Sidney Herald (1955-1963)
The Wolf Point Herald (1920-1932)
