UF receives grant to digitize historic newspapers from Florida, Puerto Rico

September 3, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida were recently awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize approximately 100,000 pages of historic newspapers.

The $325,000 grant will fund the “Florida and Puerto Rico Digital Newspaper Project,” which is part of the state’s and territory’s participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program.

Led by project director Patrick Reakes and co-director Margarita Vargas-Bettencourt, the project is a collaboration between the Smathers Libraries and the library at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. It will provide a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from Florida and Puerto Rico.

The completed project will provide free, Internet-based access to newspapers that are currently available only on aging microfilm. The digitized papers will be available through the Library of Congress Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), the University of Florida Libraries Florida Digital Newspaper Library (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/fdnl1), and the Biblioteca Digital Puertorriqueña at the University of Puerto Rico (http://bibliotecadigital.uprrp.edu/cdm/).