The California Newspaper Digital Collection is a digital collection of newspapers from California from 1849-1911. It is housed at the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at UC Riverside and is a part of the National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP). NDNP is a “joint venture of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to create a national digital newspaper resource representing papers from all states published between 1836-1922.”
Collection Principles:
The CNDC aims to digitize and catalog California newspapers from 1836-1922, so these are the broadest geographic and temporal parameters of the collection objectives. This time period has been divided into manageable chunks, each of which will be funded by a grant. The first grant covered newspapers published from 1900-1910, while the second grant targets 1880-1910. The project is intended to be completed over 20 years and include one million digital pages; the CNDC has received grants for 2005-2009 and plans to apply for further funding. Based on the funding of past grants, the project has digitized issues of the Alta California, the San Francisco Call, the Amador Ledger, the Imperial Valley Press, and the Los Angeles Herald. It is not explicitly stated why these newspapers were selected first, but the project, which began with the Alta California as a test case, has emphasized preservation as a primary objective from the start, with searchability and research access as other goals. The CNDC site directed me to the site of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), the parent project, for more information. This page explained where each state’s project searched for its materials, stating that the project “inventories holdings in public libraries, county courthouses, newspaper offices, historical museums, college and university libraries, archives, and historical societies.”
Metadata
The collection has its own search engine that enables a keyword search or advanced searches that allow users to set search limits. When I conducted a keyword search, particular articles were listed along with headline, newspaper, date, and content type. When I selected an article, the portion of the newspaper featuring that article was displayed; the article was highlighted in gray and the keywords of my search were highlighted in yellow. A ‘newspaper info’ tab reveals the newspaper, issue date, edition, volume, issue number, and page number. These records can also be retrieved by using a calendar function —which allows a user to select a date and view all newspapers available from that date —or a browse function —which allows a user to select the newspaper they want and scroll through the dates available. Technical information includes the site’s creators and their contact information, as well as the resources they used to build the site. While the source code is available, no technical metadata is easily or conveniently located on the page.
Object Characteristics
The newspapers are presented pan-scans (I believe they are jpegs and were scanned as gifs) as framed images on the page that can be clicked and dragged in order to see a different part of the page. I could not find an easy way to zoom in or out. The page can also be viewed as a PDF, which allows the user to highlight, copy, and paste text in a way that is not available with the jpeg. A text only option is also available, which lists just the text of the particular article the search has yielded.
Intended Audience
The intended audience of the site is the general public, although the research community is clearly a priority. In addition, the managers of the project clearly intend this project to be an example for other digital collections, as they document the project overview and recommendations for others who intend to implement of similar projects.
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