The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP) recently achieved an exciting milestone: Historic Oregon Newspapers now boasts over three million published pages!

Hosting papers from more than 100 municipalities statewide, the site was already the largest and most comprehensive collection of historic Oregon print journalism available for free online. The latest trove of content includes large runs of titles from several cities, including Medford, Salem, Bend, Roseburg, Klamath Falls, La Grande and Eugene.

According to Digital Collections Librarian Elizabeth Peterson: "The recent jump in our numbers is thanks to the heroic work of ODNP Project Manager Justin Spence—with critical assistance from Jeremy Echols—to remediate and ingest a backlog of data from a 2015 digitization project with Newspapers.com."

Echols, an analyst programmer with the Libraries, described the scale of the Historic Oregon Newspapers site as "absolutely massive." He noted that each published page of digitized news includes a primary view, an OCR view, and downloadable PDF, XML and JP2 image files.

"For some context, the entirety of Wikipedia's English-language content is only about 20 times larger than this single collection," he said.

Built and maintained by ODNP beginning in 2009, the site hosts content dating back to the first Oregon Spectator that rolled off the press in 1846 and spanning up to the present. An invaluable "go-to" for historians, genealogists, journalists, students and many other researchers, Historic Oregon Newspapers is among the library's most popular digital resources, with over two million visits in past years.

According to Peterson, the site still has ample potential to grow. The library began microfilming papers in 1952, and to date only a fraction of those materials have been digitized. Additionally, some current publishers have arranged to have their digital issues added directly to the collection. Operating on a cost-recovery funding model since 2016, ODNP also partners with historical societies, museums, other libraries and individual donors who sponsor newspaper titles for digitization.

At various stages the project has been supported by funding from state and federal agencies, including a 2025 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

"Work is always ongoing on this project," Peterson said. "So we can expect to see some more dramatic increases in our content this year."