The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Preservation and Access is accepting applications for the National Digital Newspaper Program.
Donor Name: National Endowment for the Humanities
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 01/12/2023
Size of the Grant: $325,000
Grant Duration: 2 years
Details:
NDNP is a partnership between NEH and the Library of Congress (LC) to create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 from all 56 states and U.S. jurisdictions. LC will permanently maintain this searchable database, which will be freely accessible online (see Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers). An accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information on the website directs users to newspaper titles available in all types of formats. During the course of its partnership with NEH, LC will digitize and contribute a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections to Chronicling America.
If your application is successful, you will select newspapers—published in your state or jurisdiction between 1690 and 1963—and over a period of two years, convert approximately 100,000 pages into digital files (preferably from microfilm), according to the technical guidelines outlined by LC. You may select titles published in any language with a valid ISO 639-2 language code (or ISO 630-3, if appropriate). For newspapers published after 1926, you may only select those in the public domain (i.e., published without copyright or for which the copyright was not registered or renewed by 1963). If you wish to select titles for digitization published after 1926, you must indemnify LC and NEH.
If you are seeking your first, second, or third NDNP award, you should develop selection criteria with the following principles in mind:
- Titles should reflect the political, economic, and cultural history of the state or jurisdiction.
- You should give preference to titles that are recognized as “papers of record” at the state or county level and that contain published legal notices, news of state and regional governmental affairs, and announcements of community news and events.
- Selected titles should provide state, or at least multi-county, coverage of the majority of the population areas.
- You should give preference to newspapers with a broad chronological span over those with short runs or those that published sporadically.
If you are seeking a subsequent NDNP award, with the help of a carefully selected advisory board, you should develop selection criteria that move beyond the newspapers of record to include the following:
- titles with underrepresented perspectives and histories
- titles that have ceased publication and/or lack ownership, and therefore would be less likely to be digitized by other sources
- previously digitized newspapers with strong justification for inclusion.
Funding Information
- Award Ceiling: $325,000
- The period of performance is two years with a start date of September 1, 2023.
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible to apply, you must be established in the United States or its jurisdictions as one of the following organization types:
- If you are an eligible applicant, you may apply on behalf of a consortium of collaborating organizations. If NEH selects your proposal for funding, you will be programmatically, legally, and fiscally responsible for the award.
- To be eligible, you must not function solely as a fiscal agent for another entity and must make substantive contributions to the success of the project.
- Individuals and other organizations, including foreign and for-profit entities, are ineligible.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
