Post written by Allia Service, UO class of 2022.
This year the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project (ODNP) website surpassed 2 million pages online! In total, we uploaded 704,088 pages. That includes 112,752 pages uploaded by our in-house digitization and digital preservation unit, 446,609 from the iArchives embargo release, and 144,727 pages from the Oregon Daily Emerald digitization project. Which completes the highly requested Daily Emerald digitization project which is now fully digitized.
This year we uploaded a total of 13 new titles including:
- Rogue River Courier (Grants Pass, OR)
- Talent News
- Jacksonville sentinel (Jacksonville, OR)
- Jacksonville post (Jacksonville, OR)
- Grants Pass Daily Courier (Grants Pass, OR)
The ODNP website had 243,788 user sessions this year, and each session lasted an average of 5 minutes 9 seconds. A session is the period a user is actively engaging with ODNP, so that means users engaged with ONDP for approximately 1,255,508 minutes (or 872 days) last year! During that time, they viewed 1,878,901 pages.
Preservation After Destruction:
Our focus this past year was on funding institutions that were impacted by the 2020 Labor Day weekend fires. With this funding, we digitized the Talent News and newspapers from Scio and the Santiam region (online soon!).
Talent News was a semimonthly newspaper published from 1892-1894 in Talent, Oregon, one of four Oregon cities which was substantially destroyed by the 2020 Labor Day fires. As Talent rebuilds, we can look back at its early history through the Talent News.
While Talent News included some local news items, it mostly featured poetry, opinion, and other non-news items. In the late 19th century, newspapers were one of the few sources of entertainment. We often think of them as basic ways to receive hard news, but Talent News is a great example of the diverse role they played. This poem from 1893 takes a critical eye to “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” apparently it was already an old-fashioned nursery rhyme 130 years ago!
The Talent News also served as a dating service for at least one “young lady, whose auburn ringlets have waved in the gentle zephyrs of 27 summers.” On November 1st 1893, Katie Didd placed a notice in the Talent News looking for a husband who was temperate, a non-smoker, and willing to work hard. Over the intervening months, several eligible bachelors wrote letters putting themselves forward as candidates.
Katie was impressed by both letters, although skeptical that W.B.A.’s horse could possibly be worth 1000 pounds of gold. Of W.W. she said “’aint you a short fellow!” but luckily for him she “like[s] short folks.” But she didn’t make a decision, instead she left both men hanging, waiting to hear from a few other men before she made any vows. Although a few more letters were exchanged, there seems to be no conclusion to Katie’s story, at least not in the Talent News
To read all of the letters between Katie and her suitors, follow the links below.
Thank you to our donors and newspaper digitization enthusiasts who make ODNP possible!