Colorado and Wyoming Launch New Historic Newspapers Collection Online Database

Just a little over five years ago the Colorado State Library released the new and improved Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) site mounted on the Veridian platform designed by New Zealand based DL Consulting. Since then, due in large part to our community partners, we have more than doubled the historic newspaper content that is freely available through the site. We and our users have also been pleased as punch with Veridian’s enhanced user features such as multiple search options, improved Optical Character Recognition (OCR), user account creation to save and share content, a crowd sourcing text correction interface, and so much more.

We have been so pleased that we are at it again! The Colorado State Library, in partnership with the Wyoming State Library and the University of Wyoming, are excited to announce the launch of the Plains to Peaks Historic Newspapers database, located at www.ppc-historicnewspapers.org.

The Plains to Peaks Historic Newspapers online collection combines the content of the CHNC and the Wyoming Newspapers collection for simple one-stop discovery. This new initiative also includes the design of a new and improved Wyoming Newspapers site located at www.wyomingnewspapers.org with content provided by both the Wyoming State Library and the University of Wyoming. Both of these new sites are built upon the existing CHNC platform design and the CHNC features users know and love can be found on both the shared Plains to Peaks site and the Wyoming site.

The Wyoming State Library has long been home to the Wyoming Newspapers online collection which includes more than 340 historic newspapers with over 800,000 pages consisting mostly of newspapers from 1849 through 1922. Along with this existing content, the new sites include content digitized by the University of Wyoming, who will continue to grow the Wyoming collection over time. Last year the University received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Grant for a Wyoming Digital Newspaper Project. The project involves the digitization of 100,000 pages of Wyoming newspapers—dating from 1863 to 1963—as part of the state’s participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). This content will also be added to the two new newspaper sites.

Together in the Plains to Peaks Historic Newspapers, the CHNC and the Wyoming Newspapers currently include 851+ newspapers published from 1849 to 2020. These newspapers cover all counties in both states and include papers published in English, German, Italian, Japanese, Slavic, Spanish, Serbian, and Swedish, and will soon include over 6.5 million digitized newspaper pages – a number that will continue to grow!

Colorado and Wyoming have a long history of working together on digital collection initiatives. Both of our states also have a long history of making our historic newspapers freely available to the world. Bringing both of these initiatives together seemed like a natural extension of what we already do for our communities. We and our users love the Veridian CHNC site and we knew Wyoming would love it too. It makes us extremely happy to expand access to historic newspapers and provide one stop searching to those seeking to explore the rich history of Colorado and Wyoming, says Regan Harper, Director of Networking and Resource Sharing at the Colorado State Library.

For more information, please contact: Leigh Jeremias, Digital Collections Coordinator, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Colorado State Library. ljeremias@coloradovirtuallibrary.org