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/.

This month, for Women’s History Month, we would like to highlight some of the history that can be found in the newspapers available on the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. There is plenty of news to be found, both related to individual historical figures as well as larger movements or events related to women in Oregon. Perhaps one of the more fascinating things to read about is the history of women’s suffrage in Oregon. Before women had the right to vote on a national level, Oregon allowed women to vote in state elections starting in 1912. You can read more about this part of our past in this previous blog post: Oregon Women’s Suffrage Centennial.

One particular figure from this movement crops up quite a bit: Abigail Scott Duniway. She was an early advocate for women’s rights, as well as publisher for the newspaper The New Northwest. From 1871 to 1887, this newspaper was dedicated to women’s rights and issues, particularly the right to vote. It was an early proponent for women’s suffrage and one of the movement’s most vocal supporters. Looking through issues of the newspaper allows for a glimpse of the evolution of this movement during that time period.

Other newspapers also provide a peek at the lives of women in Oregon and across the country in the 1800s and early 1900s. For example, The Oregon Scout from Union occasionally featured a column called “Woman’s World,” which highlighted various areas of women’s life during that era. Some would focus on domestic life, giving an idea of what life was like at home for many women. Others would discuss the growing career opportunities available to women. Some of these stories were pulled from newspapers elsewhere, providing a glimpse at life not just in Oregon, but in the rest of the United States as well.

For those interested in using some of these newspaper materials in K-12 classroom lessons, check out our lesson plan on Abigail Scott Duniway and Women’s Suffrage, which is tailored to Oregon Common Core state standards. All of our historic newspapers on the website can also be browsed and searched by keyword thanks to optical character recognition (OCR), allowing for easy research for those who want to learn more about women’s history in Oregon. In addition, content can be downloaded as a PDF or JPEG file and saved for future reference or research purposes. All of these services are free and open to the public, so don’t wait and take a look at Oregon’s historic newspapers today!

In honor of Black History Month, the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program would like to highlight some of the African American newspapers available in our digital collections! These newspapers range from historic titles such as The New Age (1896-1905), to contemporary papers such as The Skanner and the Portland Observer.

The New Age (1896-1905), an African American owned paper published by A.D. Griffin, highlights the active Black community in Portland’s history. A.D. Griffin was an avid Republican during his period as publisher of The New Age, and many of his editorial pieces discuss the political involvement of Portland’s Black community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oregon Historic Newspapers is seeking to digitize additional Black-owned and operated newspapers in Oregon’s history. The titles we are currently hoping to digitize are The Advocate (1923-1933), The Times (1911-1912), the Portland Inquirer (1944-46), the Oregon Mirror (1962), and the Portland Challenger (1952-1953). If digitized, these titles, as with all newspapers digitized by ODNP, would be freely accessible to the public and could be browsed and searched by keyword online. In addition, all content could be downloaded as a PDF or JPEG file and saved for future reference or research purposes. If you are interested in the digitization of any of these titles, please contact us here!

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We had a lot of changes in 2017!  

• The Historic Oregon Newspapers website underwent a system migration and design update. New features include an “On This Day in History” homepage showcase, an updated map and locations list, a calendar that allows users to browse by date, and an improved look-and-feel to the website. For more information on making the best of these new features, check out the new guide for using the updated website. 
• We created a fundraising guide to assist users who want to fund digitization of newspapers. The guide has resources, strategies, and grant writing best practices. 
• Over 71,000 pages were added this year! 
• We’ve featured stories on our blog from users of the website and shared their research and publications that feature ODNP newspapers. Recently, we added research from UO graduate student Jessica Sokolowski about her use of the newspapers for understanding the public reception of tax reform.  

2018 will bring more exciting additions for Historic Oregon Newspapers! Some things to look forward to include a genealogy research guide and continued improvement to the interface and usability of the website.  

Please let us know if you have any suggestions for content you would like to see this year! 

Thank you for supporting the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program! 

– Carolina and Sarah 

Bert Dunn, an avid Oregon Digital Newspaper Program supporter and contributor, will soon publish a book on Coquille, Oregon that uses ODNP newspapers for source material. It will be published by Arcadia Publishing as part of their “Images of America” series, and it will feature about 200 pictures and captions, as well as chapter narratives.

Bert described his searches on Historic Oregon Newspapers and how he used the website:

“I have been using the UO site to search for information on early sawmills, creameries and other businesses and individuals related to Coquille’s past.”

“As I work to write for a book about my hometown of Coquille, I have found the UO Digital Newspaper website to be an essential tool. I am consistently finding new information that fills gaps in our stories. Not only am I able to search my hometown papers for historic content but many other papers in the state in the same search. The search tools are flexible and powerful. With the papers fully digitized, even ads are preserved offering additional information about business products and services.”

“I really appreciate this UO service.  [Above] is one example of an ad from the Coquille City Herald, June 17, 1884.”

Thank you, Bert, and we look forward to reading your book!

Do you have a publication or project that uses newspaper content from ODNP? Let us know and we will feature it!

 

If you think direct-to-consumer prescription medication advertising is bad today, take a look at the historic newspapers we have digitized on the Oregon Historic Newspapers website! Likely, if you have taken the time to peruse just a few issues, you will have noticed an overabundance of strange medication advertisements.

In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, a lack of adequate medical care in combination with few government regulations resulted in a flurry of business called the patent medicine industry. These questionable concoctions promised lofty claims, and in large part helped fund Oregon’s early newspapers through their advertisements.

 

 

Merchants had little obligation to truthfully describe the contents and effectiveness of their products, creating tonics, pills, and syrups that often contained dangerous substances such as opium, morphine, cocaine, and alcohol. While consumers might have found temporary relief from these ingredients, patent medicines were an unfortunate cause of accidental overdose, intoxication and addiction.

 

 

Next time you are on the Oregon Historic Newspapers website reading your favorite historic papers, take notice of the patent medicine advertisements on the side of the page; I’m sure you’ll find something that surprises you!

 

This fiscal year we added 87,606 pages of historic and currently published newspapers to the ODNP site!

We made improvements to the system and workflow for handling currently published e-editions of newspapers, and we are looking forward to adding more content this next year. There are several digitization projects underway!

Also, we have a few exciting additions to the goals of ODNP for next year:

To assist the public with fundraising for historic newspaper digitization, we will be creating a fundraising how-to guide with resources, strategies, and grant writing best practices for users of ODNP around the state to fund newspaper digitization.

We are also looking forward to updating the website with better usability, features, and search functionalities. The new blog header, designed by Azle Malinao-Alvarez, provides a small preview of the upcoming updates to the look and feel.

Please be sure to check the blog frequently for new posts. This year, we will be focusing on finding connections between the ODNP collections and other UO Library collections in our Special Collections and University Archives and Oregon Digital. See our most recent blog post by our student Jane Conway, which features Colonel John “Watermelon” Redington (1851-1935), an Oregon scout turned newspaper editor.

Thanks to the ODNP team for their hard work and agility this year as we have been refining the digital and born-digital processes and workflows. A special thank you to our programmer, Jeremy, and our production manager, Randy, who have worked the hardest on this project to create better systems for quality assurance.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let us know!

-Sarah and Carolina