This blog entry written by Eric W. Schnittke, Ohio Newspaper Digitization Project Coordinator.

Let’s face it; the newspaper industry is a dying one.

News is readily available via cable news services or, more increasingly, the Internet. Subscriptions are at an all time low. Fewer and fewer people are actively seeking out news and information. And when we find information, we have to be wary, as who knows what kind of slant or spin can be put on it. With decreasing profits, advertising is harder to come by. Internet websites such as craigslist have replaced the revenue-generating classified ads and with today’s economy, the wanted ads have become slimmer and slimmer. Who needs a sports or business section when we can add news, sports, business, blogs, and even webcomic feeds to our RSS aggregators and aim all of it at our own interests? Digitization, in the name of progress as it always is, appears to be the answer.  More and more, newspapers focus on providing online content, shifting away from their palpable textual traditions.

It’s a grim but actual reality for the present and future of newspapers. For the newspapers of the past, however, it’s a different version of the same story. Moving from analog to digital, from one technology to another, has always been a priority in the field.

Many copies of older newspapers have, to this day, been left to their own devices on the shelves of libraries, archives, and museums, rarely seeing the light of day or the eyes of patrons. They can be bound, cut, brittle, flaking, in perfect condition, in no condition to be handled, and any combination of the aforementioned. For a myriad of reasons, including, but not limited to, deterioration and the amount of space that they took up in these institutions, many copies of these papers were microfilmed during the 80s and 90s and subsequently destroyed. In some cases, the microfilmed versions of the papers are all that remain.

It is with that in mind that the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) was born. This program aims at creating access to and preserving these rolls of microfilm for future use by adding them into Chronicling America, a website created with both preservation and access in mind. The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and run by the Library of Congress. The Ohio Historical Society has begun the Ohio Newspaper Digitization Project (ONDP) as part of NDNP.

So, what does this all mean, exactly? And, more importantly, what does this mean for you, the user?

First and foremost, the charge of ONDP is to digitize 100,000 pages of microfilmed newspaper from the OHS collections which will be added to Chronicling America. Chronicling ....America.... is home to the submissions of the fourteen states that have been selected for the grant thus far. The newspapers selected for ONDP will be chosen by an advisory board, comprised of members from ten regions throughout Ohio. Once the microfilm rolls have been selected, they will be shipped to our digitization vendor, iArchives, the creators of Footnote. Upon receiving them from iArchives, we will verify the digital copies and forward them to the Library of Congress for inclusion to Chronicling America.

For the user, this provides some very valuable content. The end-product is fully-searchable and presents high-quality images. The content can be used by genealogists, students researching for papers, and for the every day user that wants to peruse newspapers, in search of random facts and events. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that it will provide access to a wealth of information and serve as a preservation process for these microfilm reels and newspapers. With such a high quality image expected for each newspaper page and the best-possible quality metadata, the end-product should be of the utmost standard.

Current-day newspapers continue to struggle and move further towards total digital access and ceasing to produce any physical copies in the hope that they will find a new life on the internet. Much like their current-day brethren, the papers of ....Ohio....’s past will find a new future with the Ohio Newspaper Digitization Project.