Oregon Digital Newspaper Program Menu

The Oregon News Herald is a recent addition to the current newspapers preservation program in ODNP. Formerly North Douglas Herald, the Oregon News Herald is a free newspaper published monthly in Drain, Oregon. It provides local news, events, and information with a special focus on communities in north Douglas County and south Lane County. Editor and publisher Rusty Savage started the newspaper because he saw a need for local news coverage in the area that wasn’t being met by other media organizations.

Oregon News Herald is a great example of several new publications (here, here, here, and here) that have appeared in the last few years in Oregon to fill the gaps left by the closure or contraction of many long-time local newspapers.

We’re grateful to the publisher for joining our preservation program to ensure that this important source of local news is accessible for research into the future.

You can find print issues of Oregon News Herald at 80 locations in the region, and through their website. Issues are also available in Historic Oregon Newspapers:

• North Douglas Herald (2023-2025)
• Oregon News Herald (2025- )

We would love to add more current titles to our preservation program! Historic Oregon Newspapers doesn’t replace newspapers’ websites or distribution models, but we do provide a secure and stable preservation system to ensure that current digital newspapers are available into the future for research and education, just like our historical newspapers. The program is free for publishers to participate, but they must opt-in and sign a license permission form that allows ODNP to preserve and make the content available online. ODNP will never ingest content from current newspapers without prior permission from the publisher.

 

A guest post by Justin Spence, ODNP Project Manager and coordinator of the tribal publications project

We recently posted about ODNP’s current project to digitize Native American tribal newspapers. Under the same initiative, we are also digitizing newspapers and other serialized publications from other eras that pertain directly to the history of Native American people in Oregon. Key among these are materials produced at the institution known today as Chemawa Indian School (and by other names earlier in its history), both in its current location in Salem and its earliest instantiation as the Forest Grove Indian School in Forest Grove. (We will refer to these collectively simply as “Chemawa” for simplicity.) 

Chemawa is part of the system of federally run residential schools established in the United States whose primary mission for many decades was to remove Native American children from their families, often hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and assimilate them to a dominant American society. The history of the residential schools is complex, with students having quite varied experiences depending on circumstances such as which school they attended and when, the school staff and administrators, prevailing attitudes towards discipline and the value of Native American knowledge systems, etc. But collectively these institutions are widely considered to have negatively impacted many individuals who went through them, who suffered various forms of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, with lasting effects on the communities they came from in the present day.  

Currently, there are major efforts to document and better understand the experiences of students who attended the federal residential schools, including at the national level via the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative (culminating with an official apology issued in October 2024) and nonprofits such as the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, alongside numerous local, community-led initiatives. One important component of this broad effort is providing access to archival documents generated by the bureaucratic apparatus created to support systems of coercive assimilation that the residential schools too often imposed. The Chemawa school newspaper is one such set of documents and is especially important because it provides glimpses at regular intervals of student life at Chemawa. In some years, especially by the mid-20th century, the newspaper was produced with significant input from the student body itself, voices that are rarely heard so directly in other kinds of historical documents (e.g., reports generated by school administrators). The newspaper ran as The Indian Citizen when the school was still located at Forest Grove, then was published as the Weekly Chemawa American and Chemawa American (with earlier and later instantiations under that title) after it relocated to its present-day location in Salem in the late 1880s. 

The ODNP digitization effort was initiated by some of the federally recognized tribes of Oregon and has received a strong endorsement from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (resolution #2023-04, “Endorsement for the Addition of Chemawa Indian School’s Historic Newspapers to the Oregon Historical Newspaper Program Repository”). Drawing materals provided by over a dozen archival repositories, ODNP has nearly finished digitizing issues spanning more than a century (1880s to 1980s). We are now turning our attention to digitizing yearbooks published at Chemawa each spring starting in the 1920s. Although these are not newspapers, they are serials published annually and can be incorporated into the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. We are also exploring alternative platforms that might be able to host the yearbooks once digitization is complete, such as Oregon Digital, Northwest Digital Heritage, and the Plateau Peoples’ Portal (the last of these already hosts some issues of the Chemawa yearbook). 

ODNP would like to thank the partner institutions who generously provided access to materials in their collections, in many cases digitizing materials free of charge. Without their contributions, we would not have been able to provide the same level of access to these important historical documents. 

• Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde 
• The Huntington Library 
• Library of Congress 
• Oregon Historical Society 
• Pacific University Libraries 
• Princeton University Library Special Collections 
• State Library of Oregon 
• University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archive 
• University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
• Washington State University, Terrell Library 
• Whitman College and Northwest Archives, Penrose Library 
• Willamette University Libraries 
• Wisconsin Historical Society 
• Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 

A guest post by Justin Spence, ODNP Project Manager and coordinator of the tribal publications project

One ongoing ODNP project, funded by the State Library of Oregon via a Library Services and Technology Act grant, is focused on digitizing historical and current newspapers related to Native American tribes of Oregon. This includes three newspapers published by tribes themselves, which have been published continuously since the 1970s: Smoke Signals (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde), Siletz News (Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians), and Spilyay Tymoo ‘Coyote News’ (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs). Under partnerships established with these tribes, ODNP has nearly finished processing the complete runs of these three titles, and we add new issues on an ongoing basis soon after they are published, ensuring that they will be preserved in perpetuity in UO Libraries’ digital archives. We’ve also added Siletz News II, an independent newspaper published by a Siletz tribal member for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

All of these publications offer news about events occurring on their respective reservations and surrounding regions that is rarely covered in other newspapers, as well as many articles featuring information about Indian Country more broadly nationwide. Importantly, these tribal newspapers are written and published from the perspectives of members of the tribal communities themselves. This reflects a major shift in emphasis away from writing about Native American people towards writing by and for Native American people – helping ensure that Pacific Northwest journalism represents a much broader range of views on the significance of current and historical events affecting Native communities than was found before these newspapers were founded.  

While ODNP is proud to offer a permanent archival home and ongoing public access for these newspapers, readers can access recent issues on the newspapers’ own websites, where they will also find information about various aspects of the tribes’ governance, current projects, events, and other activities. Here are links to the websites for Smoke Signals, Siletz News, and Spilyay Tymoo. And although they are not currently participating in ODNP, you might also be interested in checking out the Confederated Umatilla Journal (Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation), Voice of CTCLUSI (Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians), Klamath Tribes News (Klamath Tribes) and Tu’-kwa Hone, the newsletter of the Burns Paiute Tribe. The Coquille Tribe and Cow Creek Band of Umqua Tribe of Indians also feature sections with current news on their official websites. 

The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program has been awarded grant funds of $324,900 to digitize 100,000 pages of Oregon newspapers over the next two years. The grant is through the National Digital Newspaper Program, a division of the National Endowment for the Humanities. ODNP got its start with several rounds of NDNP funding from 2009-2015, and has been operating on a cost-recovery model since then. The additional funding will supercharge ODNP’s productivity, since we already digitize about 100,000 pages of historical content per year.

The NDNP grant award will help us expand access to a range of different Oregon newspapers. We will focus on digitizing newspapers from the labor movement, faith communities, and racial, ethnic and linguistic minorities, as well as enhancing geographic representation from Oregon counties that are currently underrepresented in Historic Oregon Newspapers. An advisory board will help make the selections for the specific titles.

Read more here: https://library.uoregon.edu/news/oregon-digital-newspaper-program-awarded-neh-funding.

The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program has collaborated with Newspapers.com (a subsidiary of Ancestry.com) and publisher E.O. Media to digitize even more historic Oregon newspapers. Newspapers.com borrowed negative master microfilm reels from UO Libraries to digitize multiple newspaper titles at no cost to ODNP. After an embargo period, ODNP can add the digitized issues to Historic Oregon Newspapers.

In 2020, ODNP staff started adding digitized issues from the first project, and we are continuing to work on adding the rest of the Phase 1 files. In 2027, we will be able to add files from the second project.

In the meantime, the UO Libraries provides access to all of these titles and issues through a subscription to Newspapers.com. UO students, staff, and faculty can access the database online, and the public can access it on public library computers in any UO campus library. Subscribers to Ancestry.com and/or the Oregon newspapers portion of Newspapers.com can now access of this new content.

Phase 1 Titles (2015 project)

Albany, Oregon 

• Morning Daily Herald, 1888-1891 
• Albany Daily Democrat, 1889-1922 
• Daily Evening Albany Democrat, 1888-1889
• Albany Democrat, 1900-1910; 1922-1925 
• Albany Evening Herald, 1910-1925 
• Albany Evening Herald and Albany Democrat, 1925 
• Albany Democrat-Herald, 1925-1963 

Bend, Oregon 

• Bend Bulletin (Daily), 1918-1963 
• Bulletin, 1963 

Corvallis, Oregon 

• Corvallis Gazette-Times, 1910-1963 

Eugene, Oregon 

• Daily Eugene Guard, 1891-1906 
• Eugene Daily Guard, 1906-1926 
• Eugene Guard, 1926-1930 
• Eugene Morning Register, 1895-1906 
• Morning Register, 1906-1929 
• Eugene Register, 1929-1930 
• Eugene Register-Guard, 1930-1963 

Klamath Falls 

• Klamath News, 1923-1942 
• Evening Herald, 1923-1942 
• Herald and News, 1942-1963 

LaGrande, Oregon 

• Morning Observer, 1897-1904
• Evening Observer, 1912-1959 
• Observer, 1930-1933; 1959-1963 

Medford, Oregon 

• Medford Mail, 1892-1909 
• Medford Mail Tribune (Daily), 1906-1909; 1916-1963 

Portland, Oregon 

• Oregon Daily Journal, 1902-1963 

Roseburg, Oregon 

• Review (Daily), 1901-1920 
• Evening News, 1909-1920 
• News-Review, 1920-1963 

Salem, Oregon 

• Oregon Statesman, 1851-1963 
• Capital Journal, 1923-1963 

Phase 2 Titles (2024 project)

Astoria, Oregon

• Astoria Evening Budget, 1893-1930
• Astoria Weekly Budget, 1904-1915
• The Daily Astorian, 1876-2014
• Weekly Astorian, 1949-1965

Baker City, Oregon

• Baker City Herald, 1890-2014
• Bedrock Democrat, 1905-1874
• Evening Baker Herald, 1918-1929
• Weekly Bedrock Democrat, 1921-1928

Bend, Oregon

• The Bend Bulletin, 1903-1931
• The Bulletin, 1916-2014
• Central Oregon Press, 1921-1926

Enterprise, Oregon

• Wallowa County Chieftain, 1884-2014
• Wallowa County Reporter, 1917-1921

Hermiston, Oregon

• Hermiston Herald, 1945-2014

John Day, Oregon

• Blue Mountain Eagle, 1900-2014
• Grant County News, 1897-1908

La Grande, Oregon

• La Grande Morning Star, 1907-1911
• La Grande Weekly Observer, 1897-1911
• The Observer, 1897-2014
• The Observer-Star, 1909-1924

Pendleton, Oregon

• E O: East Oregonian, 1882-1910
• East Oregonian, 1888-2014

Redmond, Oregon

• The Redmond Spokesman, 1914-2014

Salem, Oregon

• Capital Press (California ed.), 1992-2007
• Capital Press (Eastern Oregon ed.), 1975-2014
• Capital Press (Idaho ed.), 1991-2003
• Capital Press (Western Oregon ed.), 1928-2014

Seaside, Oregon

• Seaside Signal, 1964-2014

In 1952, a University of Oregon librarian set out to accomplish an audacious vision: to collect and preserve all Oregon newspapers on microfilm. To reach her goal she would need more than administrative buy-in, more than state-of-the-art equipment, more than funding: she would need a roadmap of Oregon and plenty of gas.  

Reference Librarian Elizabeth Findly created the Oregon Newspaper Microfilming Project in the University of Oregon library over seventy years ago, and researchers from Oregon and beyond continue to benefit from her vision. Her work established the library’s unique collection of over 1,500 Oregon newspaper titles on microfilm, which eventually enabled the library to create the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program to ensure open, online access to these important primary sources.  

Part I: Early Newspaper Collecting 

Elizabeth Findly came to work in the UO library in 1934. By then the library had started collecting Oregon newspapers in their original newsprint for a while, thanks to a gift from Professor Joseph Schafer of the History department who donated his personal collection to the library (Sheldon, qtd. in McCullough, 102). By 1942 the library’s newspaper collection numbered over 8,000 bound volumes (McCullough, 102). Findly had “a well-known enthusiasm for newspapers as research materials,” and in her role as head of the Reference Division from 1947-1970, she systematically ordered subscriptions to nearly every Oregon newspaper published in the state to grow the library’s collection (Stave, 14). In 1969, the library was subscribing to 123 Oregon newspapers, as well as twenty titles from out of state and thirty foreign newspapers (“Newspapers on Microfilm”). 

In 1943 the publisher of the Eugene Register-Guard donated 148 bound volumes (1885-1930) of the Eugene Register to the UO Libraries. Willis C. Warren, the head of the library, “expressed his pleasure” at the gift, and “explained that the library had ample facilities for storing newspaper volumes. He hoped, too, that other state newspapers would send their files and…a microfilm laboratory might be established…Microfilming, Mr. Warren believes, is the filing system of the future” (“Baker Gives”). 

In 1949 the UO Libraries purchased the first microfilm copies of a newspaper for the library collection. The library acquired microfilm copies of the Portland Oregonian for the years 1851-1910 directly from the Oregonian. Carl W. Hintz, head librarian, “states that microfilm will not only be more durable but will save 95 per cent in storage space” (“Library Buys Old Copies”). 

By the late 1940s the “ample facilities for storing newspapers” was running short and the library’s collection of newspapers was fragile and in danger of disintegration (Stave, 14). Elizabeth Findly and the library’s administration were actively planning to establish a newspaper microfilm operation in the library.  

Part II: The Oregon Newspaper Microfilming Project Begins 

In 1952 the Oregon Newspaper Microfilming Project began in the library’s General Reference department under Elizabeth Findly’s direction. She set out to accomplish what she called “a rather ambitious microfilming project,” nothing less than assembling the most comprehensive collection of Oregon newspapers in order to preserve them on microfilm (qtd. in Stave, 14).  

Findly created a cost-recovery model to fund the microfilm service. The library would contract with newspaper publishers such that publishers would give the library current subscriptions to their papers and loans of their back files for microfilming. Once the issues were microfilmed, the publishers would buy copies of the microfilm reels at $18 per 1,200-page reel. “About a dozen newspapers became ‘contract papers’ but Findly affirmed her intention to film all Oregon newspapers with or without the cooperation of their publishers” (Stave, p. 14). Findly had to go out on the road to retrieve the papers herself. 

Over the next twenty-five years, Findly, and later Frances Schoen, traveled by car around the state in search of newspaper back files. They visited “every known publisher, including the smallest weeklies, and [brought] back their papers for the [microfilm] camera.” Findly sometimes put thousands of miles on her Oldsmobile in a biennial period. Schoen often traveled with her three children and husband, and the whole family helped load papers into their station wagon. Schoen reported that she went through three station wagons, and that there were ‘no back roads in Oregon that we did not travel’” (Stave, 15). 

Oregon libraries and historical societies also contributed back issues of newspapers. For example, the Oregon Historical Society had collections at least as large as those at UO and OHS generously lent papers that had not been part of their own microfilming efforts (Stave, 15). 

Part III: Production and Funding Challenges 

In 1958 the Oregon Daily Emerald reported that the library had microfilmed more than 200,000 pages of Oregon newspapers since 1956. Nonetheless, in the first decade of the program, the microfilming staff averaged twelve rolls per month, hardly enough to keep up with current subscriptions, much less to address the back issues already in the library. In 1961 Findly took over the microfilming operations and pushed the staff to increase their output. Frances Schoen, along with five to fifteen student employees, pushed the project’s output up to forty reels per month in 1963, and up to sixty-eight per month by 1967 (Stave, 15) 

The newspaper microfilming project relied on sales of positive reels to newspaper publishers, as well as libraries, historical societies, and museums to help fund the program. However, the most profitable newspapers—the Portland Oregonian, the Salem Statesman-Journal, and the Eugene Register-Guard, were sold exclusively by a commercial microfilm publisher, so the library program had “to rely for most of its income upon single subscriptions to the smaller, less frequently filmed papers” (Stave, 15). This cost model also didn’t account for microfilming newspapers that had ceased publication, and which no longer had publishers or successors to purchase the backfiles. The UO Library eventually became the microfilm service’s best customer when it decided to purchase one positive copy of every roll produced. In 1997, the UO library and one other subscriber accounted for 60 percent of the of the newspaper microfilm project’s revenue (Stave, 15). 

Part IV: Stability and Growth 

According to Stave, the program enjoyed a long period of stability and efficiency from 1977 into the late 1990s thanks to full-time expert staff, well-designed workflows, standards-based filming, quality control checks, good equipment, and an accurate database of holdings (Stave, 20). 

This positioned the program to receive a $52,220 planning grant in 1994 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to participate in the U.S. Newspaper Program, a national project started in 1982 to “preserve, catalog and microfilm newspapers from the 1800s to the present.” The library’s grant award funded a survey of newspaper holdings at libraries and historical societies across Oregon, ultimately contributing to a union catalog of all U.S. newspapers (Klopfenstein). Another larger grant of $258,220 came in 1998 to continue the cataloging and microfilming project (Meeuwsen).” 

Part V: The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program Begins 

The UO Libraries continued to subscribe to Oregon newspapers and to preserve them on microfilm through the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2008, Karen Estlund, the head of Digital Scholarship Services, seized the opportunity to make the newspaper collection more accessible by partnering with the National Digital Newspaper Program to begin digitizing titles in the Libraries’ newspaper collection. Below is a timeline of the next phase of the newspaper program, the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program.

• 2009 – UO Libraries awarded a $363,042 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project. The grant award funded digitization of 100,000 pages of Oregon newspapers as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. 
• 2010 – Historic Oregon Newspapers website goes live. 
• 2011 – Over 100,000 pages of digitized newspapers added to Historic Oregon Newspapers website. UO Libraries awarded additional funding to continue newspaper digitization. 
• 2012 – More than 200,000 pages of digitized newspapers available on the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. 
• 2013 – UO Libraries awarded additional funding to continue newspaper digitization. Over 300,000 pages of digitized newspapers available in Historic Oregon Newspapers. 
• 2014 – Historic Oregon Newspapers website reaches over 500,000 pages. The last year of newspaper microfilming in UO Libraries. 
• 2015 – Final year of National Digital Newspaper Program funding. Over 700,000 pages available online. The UO Libraries’ newspaper microfilm service ends. Born-digital newspaper preservation program begins. 
• 2016 – A selection of current, born-digital Oregon newspapers available in Historic Oregon Newspapers. The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program begins to operate on a cost-recovery model by partnering with organizations to fund digitization. 
• 2025 – Over 2.5 million pages of digitized and current newspapers—380 titles—available in Historic Oregon Newspapers 

The story of Elizabeth Findly’s work to assemble the tens of thousands of newspaper issues that became the University of Oregon Libraries’ comprehensive collection illustrates both the precarity of the historical record and the impact that one person and one institution can have to preserve that record. It’s amazing that we now have such complete runs of so many newspaper titles, with so few gaps in coverage. Her work demonstrates that library collections and archives don’t simply happen; they are the result of advocacy, planning, fundraising, lifting, sorting, describing, and documenting. Elizabeth Findly died ten years before the first digital Oregon newspaper appeared online in Historic Oregon Newspapers, but it couldn’t have happened without her foresight and drive, literally.

–written by Elizabeth Peterson 

____________________________________________

References 

“Baker Gives Old Files To Library Collection,” Oregon Daily Emerald, March 19, 1943, p. 11.
Klopfenstein, Ed, “University librarians to help in preserving state’s old newsprint,” Oregon Daily Emerald, July 7, 1994, p. 1, 4
“Library Buys Old Copies,” Oregon Daily Emerald, Nov. 1, 1949, p. 6.
McCollough, Robert. “The Development of the Collections of the University of Oregon Library: Policies and Practices, 1875-198_. University of Oregon Library, 1988. https://hdl.handle.net/1794/903
Meeuwsen, Teri. “National project archives Oregon’s newspapers.” Oregon Daily Emerald, Feb. 19, 1998, p. 9.
“Newspapers Microfilmed,” Oregon Daily Emerald, May 5, 1958, p. 7.
“Newspapers on Microfilm Ready at UO.” Eugene Register-Guard, May 5, 1969, p. 12A
Sheldon, Henry Davidson, and University of Oregon. Library. The University of Oregon Library, 1882-1942. Eugene, Or: [University of Oregon Library], 1942. 
Stave, Tom. “Newspaper microfilming at the University of Oregon.” OLA Quarterly (1997), 3(2), 14-15+. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/1093-7374.1448  

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. 

• Nov. 1st 1893,  
• Nov. 15th 1893,  
• Dec. 1st 1893 (page 1 and page 4),  
• Dec 15th 1893,   
• Jan 1st 1894 

Thank you to our donors and newspaper digitization enthusiasts who make ODNP possible!  

This year the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP) uploaded 80,013 pages of Oregon newspapers to the website! These 80,000 pages came from currently-publishing and historic newspapers all around Oregon. Some of the new historic newspapers include: 

• Forest Grove Independent 
• Washington County Hatchet 
• Washington County News 
• Forest Grove Press 
• Forest Grove Express 
• Mosier Bulletin  
• East Oregonian  
• Beaverton Review 
• Beaverton Enterprise 
• Eugene Weekly Guard and Twice a Week Guard  
• Nyssa Gate City Journal 
• Coquille Valley Sentinel 
• The Grantonian 
• Hood River Glacier  
• Bandon Recorder 
• The Clackamas Print / the Cougar Print / The Print 

We also added over 189,000 pages to our website from our newspapers.com project, which is now open access!

• The Evening journal
• The Oregon daily journal
• Portland evening journal
• Oregon statesman
• The Oregon statesman
• Weekly Oregon statesman
• United purity news

The ODNP website brought in 121,825 unique users, nearly a third of whom returned to the site another time. Users of the site spent an average of 6 minutes 40 seconds browsing and visited 10 different pages! 

Two of the titles we uploaded last year were early editions of school newspapers: the Grantonian and the Print. These papers give us a glimpse into the lives of students of the past. The Grantonian, published by Ulysses S. Grant High School students in southeast Portland, includes stories about everything from high school sports, the school board and integration. One story from March 1967 chronicles the arrival of the miniskirt trend in the pacific northwest and wonders “who shall be the first brave soul to try and slip a mini through the hallowed halls of Grant?” The next October, an op ed ran lambasting girls who dared wear “minis” to school, or even worse, culottes! 

The Print, published by Clackamas Community College (CCC) students, tackled issues like faculty strikes, school clubs and student protests. But its April first issue usually had a little something extra. Most years the Print staff published “the Misprint” for April fools day, writing pages of fake stories and inside jokes. The 1987 issue included an article written entirely in German, a multi-story joke about a CIA plot involving CCC students and plutonium and a recruitment ad for CCC’s own flying army. 

 

Thank you to our donors and newspaper digitization enthusiasts who make ODNP possible! 

 

Blog post compiled and edited by Allia Service, University of Oregon undergraduate student and Libraries student employee.

An article highlighting ODNP work was recently published in AroundtheO. Thank you to Jason Stone in University Communications for the article titled:

New collection helps preserve the legacy of a civil rights trailblazer.

This article discusses the six new titles coming to ODNP, including the Advocate, a Portland-based, black-owned newspaper edited by the renowned civil rights activist, Beatrice Morrow Cannady. The Advocate is the first of the new titles available on the Historic Oregon Newspapers site— that’s nearly 3,000 pages of journalism from a leading African-American newspaper!

We are very grateful for the anonymous donation that is making the addition of these six new, diverse titles possible.

 

Happy New Year from the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program!

As of today, January 11, 2019, the ODNP website has surpassed 1 million pages online! Only a handful of statewide newspaper digitization and preservation programs have over 1 million pages and we are happy to be in their ranks.

2018 has been an exciting year for the Program. We accomplished the following:

• Added over 75,000 pages to the website.
• Partnered with 4 libraries, 1 public donor, 1 private donor, and 4 organizations for digitization projects.
• Received a $23,000 anonymous donation to digitize Just Out, The Advocate, and four more Portland-based titles.
• Featured on NDN History Research blog and Building Knowledge.
• Contributed to the Reveal Digital project with the digitization The Western American.
• Added another high school newspaper, The Amplifier.
• Exhibited and presented at five conferences.
• Added eight new user stories to the blog, including information about how the website was used for four authors and their publications, an undergraduate class, genealogists, and a UO graduate student’s dissertation.

… and more!

As always, thanks to all of our newspaper digitization enthusiasts for supporting the Program. Without outreach and advocacy, we would not know about all of the users and interesting research that is done with the website!

Most importantly, thanks to the past and present ODNP team who do all of the work to digitize and preserve the newspapers, and keep the website up and running.

2019 is looking exciting. Please reach out if you want to get involved and add your local newspaper title to the website.

Image from https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn88086023/1919-01-01/ed-1/seq-10/.