The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced grants for humanities projects nationwide on August 1 and the University of Oregon Libraries was named one of 97 award recipients.

We're pleased to announce that the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP) will receive $324,907 through the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

UO Libraries’ funded project, "Expanding Coverage of Oregon Newspapers in Chronicling America" aims to digitize 100,000 pages published between 1855 and 1963. Building on a history of partnership, this marks the fourth time that ODNP has been awarded NEH support for its work. 

“We are excited to participate in the National Digital Newspaper Program again,” said Digital Collections Librarian Elizabeth Peterson, ODNP’s program manager. “This award will help us expand access to a range of different Oregon newspapers. We will be focusing on digitizing newspapers from the labor movement, faith communities, and racial, ethnic and linguistic minorities.”

The library has been collecting and providing access to newspapers for over a century, Peterson noted. In 1952, a microfilm service was established with a goal of preserving all available Oregon newspapers on microfilm. This became the core of the most comprehensive collection of Oregon newspapers in the state.

Launched in 2009, ODNP has digitized over 2.5 million newsprint pages to date and provided public access through a free online database, Historic Oregon Newspapers. The site hosts papers from more than 100 municipalities statewide, published across the decades since the first Oregon Spectator rolled off the press in 1846. It's an invaluable resource for historians, genealogists, journalists, students and many other researchers.

“Last year, more than two million visitors came to the site—making it one of the library’s most popular digital resources,” said Peterson.

ODNP Project Manager Justin Spence joined the program in 2024. Working to preserve diverse expressions of Oregon's journalism heritage, he's helped digitize titles including Spilyay Tymoo (‘Coyote News’, published by the Confederated Tribes of Warms Springs), Siletz News and the Portland Observer. Now he’s looking forward to engaging with the new batch of titles that will be added to the database with funding support from the NEH.

“In many of our previous grant-funded efforts, we’ve focused on ‘newspapers of record’ at the county level that ran continuously for many decades," said Spence. "In this new project, we’re digitizing more specialized titles featuring a broader range of perspectives than what’s currently available in Historic Oregon Newspapers."

This expanded breadth of coverage will include newspapers that were published by specific faith and ethnic communities in Oregon, such as the Jewish Tribune, the Methodist Pacific Christian Advocate and the German-language Deutsche Zeitung. Also included is one of the oldest trade union publications in the United States—based in Portland, the Northwest Labor Press was first issued in 1900. Geographic coverage will be expanded by digitizing historic newspapers from rural communities across the state, including the Jordan Valley Express, Pine Valley Herald and Fossil Journal.

“The National Endowment for the Humanities is proud to support research, exhibitions, teacher training and preservation projects that examine and illuminate our history, literature and culture,” said NEH Acting Chairman Michael McDonald.