Many Mountains, Much News: Digitizing Appalachia’s Historic Newspapers

This panel session will discuss various aspects of the digitization process and highlight actual newspaper stories now available on the Chronicling America site. Abstract: For centuries, newspapers in Appalachia were a vitally important source for reporting local and state news. Their pages circulated through the many mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, carrying reports to the people on the day’s news from Civil War battles to the Hatfield & McCoy Feud, to the violence of “Bloody Breathitt” County, to the massacre at Matewan, from the roots of mountain music to the final vote cast in the debate over the 19th amendment to the US Constitution. Today, Appalachians can now read the pages and papers coveted by their great-great-great-grandparents, discover stories from the past, and explore more than a century’s worth of rich genealogical data from birth, marriage and death notices through the website for the Library of Congress and their newspaper portal: Chronicling America. Recipients of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, three universities, West Virginia University, the University of Tennessee and the University of Kentucky, along with the Library of Virginia, are digitizing Appalachia’s historic newspapers from the nineteen century through the early years of the twentieth century for the Library of Congress National Digital Newspaper Project

Read All About It! Outreach for Digital Collections with the National Digital Newspaper Program

Learn about a variety of outreach initiatives featuring digitized newspapers as panelists from state awardees of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) share about their work to highlight digital collections. The National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress developed NDNP for state partners to digitize historic newspapers from across the country and make them freely accessible in the Chronicling America (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) newspaper database, which now has over 19 million digitized pages. This session brings together partners from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and West Virginia each presenting on a unique outreach project for their digital newspaper collection. Hear about social media campaigns, online exhibits, K-12 history day resources, volunteer research and transcription events, and more that can be modeled to feature your own institution’s digital and analog collections