The Virginia Newspaper Project seeks to preserve, digitize and provide free public access to a selection of significant Virginia newspapers. The project processed a wide assortment ofpapers including a collection of over 175 titles published at Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps. Also we completed work on the Northern Neck News, the Staunton Spectator, the Central Presbyterian, and many other Virginia titles. As a result of this work, patrons both local and world-wide have free access to an important selection of newspapers that span the state from the Northern Neck to the Shenandoah Valley, and down to southwest Virginia.
The Virginia Newspaper Project(VNP) and Virginia’s public library systems have an effective and successful partnership over the past 15 years. During the life of the VNP, the public libraries were able locate and loan a sizable number of titles that were cataloged, stabilized and microfilmed by Project staff (with a selected number eventually digitized).
Regional, public, and county libraries all recognized the importance of both preserving and providing optimum access to Virginia newspapers. And the Newspaper Project understood that the local libraries held newspapers not to be found anywhere else. It was this cooperative spirit and shared goals, along with a feeling of urgency that contributed to the success of the cataloging and microfilming phase of the project.
In more recent years, the so-called digital age, public libraries and the Library of Virginia found a new opportunity to work together in order to have an increasing number of local imprint newspapers digitized, both current and historical. Patrons want the advanced features and ease of access that digital newspapers can provide and they would prefer to have one central location for much of their research.
The Library of Virginia has contributed its digital newspaper content to the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. But the Library of Virginia has its own stand-alone newspaper repository, Virginia Chronicle, which holds over 1,000,000 pages of Virginia imprint newspapers digitized, of which more than half of those pages are not held by the Library of Congress. Virginia Chronicle is an excellent tool for patrons who wish to search a large corpus of Virginia newspapers and they can be used for genealogy, historical research, data mining, and just to look up interesting stuff.
It is said that newspapers can be seen as being the first draft of American history. Preserving and providing free availability of current and historical newspapers are vital not only to safeguarding Virginia’s past but also ensuring access to prime resource to patrons, whether at the Library of Virginia, at a regional, public, or county library, or from one’s computer at home.
