5.25.2007

UNT-L Awarded $397,552 by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress

Isn't this incredibly exciting? We were in a GovDocs department meeting when Cathy Hartman broke in to tell us the news, and Dreanna dropped by my office later to bounce up and down with (completely appropriate) joy.
"The University of North Texas Libraries has been selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress for the National Digital Newspaper Program, "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers." The Award of $397,552 will fund digitization of Texas Historical Newspapers, and for the grant UNT serves as lead institution with partners at the Center for American History at the University of Texas, and Texas Tech University. Only one lead institution will be selected in each U.S. state, and the University of North Texas Libraries has been selected to head the project in Texas. The award of $397,552 will fund the first two years of this twenty year initiative."

~ Dreanna Belden, Librarian for Project Development, UNT

3 comments:

Auntie K said...

Fabulous! Congratulations to UNT Libraries. I can't wait to see how this project grows, and am looking forward to searching historical Texas newspapers.

Adam said...

So what kind of papers will this index? Just the biggies like the Dallas Morning News or all the local rags? Any idea if it will be generating searchable text accessible by something as delicious as a RSS feed?

Starrlett said...

Hi Adam,

I'm not sure yet, this being a new project and something developed outside of my department, but based on the past work our Digital Projects Unit has put into the Portal to Texas History, my guess is that it will have full-text searching with highlighted terms within pages, and that searches will be able to be saved as RSS feeds.

You can check out those features currently on the Portal to Texas History:
http://texashistory.unt.edu/