START SPREADING THE NEWS. A journey in social media usage for outreach in a cooperative digitization project

Social media is an excellent outreach tool that can be an effective and cost-friendly way to be heard and tell people about valuable primary resources. However, as major projects go, they are part of a larger institution – or cooperative group of institutions – and that entails a look at broader or related procedures and collaboration between partners. Ensuring that social media efforts are in accordance with institutional guidelines and policies is crucial. Creating a social media framework and guidelines to focus outreach and communication for a particular project is highly recommended. It is also important to focus guidelines in the context of collaborating institutional or organizational partnerships. This alignment can provide a roadmap between social media efforts for the project and the larger outreach and educational efforts with collaborating institutional partners. The Vermont Digital Newspaper Project, part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is on a journey of social media spreading-the-news activities while at the same time, developing an approach that fits into existing or in-progress institutional policies. In this presentation, the author will present on the project\u27s social media activities and channels. We will explore the challenges and opportunities that arise from coordinating social media efforts between different areas of the organization, the project, the partners, and the users. The author will also share his experience in developing social media policy and guidelines

Bringing the past to the people: outreach efforts and value-added content for chronicling America in Hawaii and Vermont.

Since 2008, the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) Library has digitized over 200,000 pages of historical English language newspapers in Hawaii published between 1836-1922. This is being done under the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC) grant funding. Starting in its second two-year grant cycle, the Hawaii Digital Newspaper Project (HDNP) focuses more on bringing the news to the people through digital and in-person outreach activities that foster community research on genealogy or local history. By adding value to the digitized content using social media (i.e. Flickr albums and Facebook/Twitter cross-postings) and integrating it with a library-wide outreach, the project is exposed to audiences who might not have been aware of the resources previously. These initiatives were further validated by NEH through their encouragement to other grantees to follow suit with these ideas. In addition, NDNP/Chronicling America’s content has been presented in college classes, informing users about a valuable primary resource useful for research. Meanwhile, outreach efforts outside UHM have also been done and more plans are afoot. Past events include talks at public libraries, high schools, conferences, and national parks. This is especially useful for non-UH groups and residents on islands other than Oahu, who can utilize the full-text-search-capable, primary-resource database for research. In April 2013, the first author moved to the Vermont Digital Newspaper Project (VTDNP) as Project Librarian for its second grant cycle. Though Vermont and Hawaii are both relatively small states, they have different (and some similar) approaches in outreach and raising awareness about Chronicling America. The latter part of this paper will explore how VTDNP plans to execute its outreach. This paper attempts to illustrate different approaches taken by HDNP and VTDNP, two relatively smaller projects under NDNP, in spreading the word and raising public awareness about Chronicling America. What’s the point of a multimillion-dollar project to provide free online access to historic newspapers if nobody knows about it

Expressions: The Newspaper Masthead

Capturing the essence of Vermont Newspapers 1836-1922. This poster shows examples of many historic-newspaper mastheads from historic Vermont newspapers that have been digitized and added to Chronicling America (see link to this website, below)