Oregon Digital Newspaper Program Expands African American Collection

Masthead of the Portland Observer, the latest African American newspaper to be digitized and added to the Oregon Historic Newspapers database.

02/12/2025

The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP) recently finished digitizing the complete run of the Portland Observer, an African American newspaper published in Portland from 1970 to the present. Read a brief history and overview of the publication.

“The UO Libraries owns the negative microfilm masters for this title so we were able to use that as our source for digitization for 1970-2014. Portland Observer also participates in our current, born-digital newspaper preservation program, so we have issues up to 2022 in our Historic Oregon Newspapers database,” shared Digital Collections Librarian Elizabeth Peterson, MA, MLIS, the program manager for the ODNP. 

The project was sponsored by Angela Addae, JD, PhD, a faculty member in the Law School. She successfully applied for a campus climate IDEAL grant to fund the digitization. Other staff that contributed to the project include Digitization Specialists Emily Young and Sam Bothun, ODNP Project Manager Justin Spence, and student employees: Rebecca Daniel, Kayla Lopez, Aiden Rinehart, and Summer Ford. 

“We’re so pleased to be able to make all the issues available for research in our free, open-access database Historic Oregon Newspapers. It’s a rich source of information about the recent history of Portland and the African American community,” added Peterson.

In 2024, the ODNP team added more than 112,000 digitized pages to the Historic Oregon Newspapers database (up 2.3 times more than the previous year), which brings the total pages available to 2.5 million, and the number of visitors to 2.2 million. The ODNP’s digitization projects have far-reaching and transformative effects on the research of its users throughout the state of Oregon and beyond.

The Portland Observer joins the growing collection of African American newspapers in Historic Oregon Newspapers as well as other African American publications available through UO Libraries including: