| Producer | National Digital Newspaper Program (United States) |
|---|---|
| History | 2007–present |
| Languages | English, Spanish, German, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, Russian, Bulgarian (non-exhaustive list) |
| Access | |
| Cost | Free |
| Coverage | |
| Format coverage | Newspapers |
| Temporal coverage | 1690–1963 |
| Geospatial coverage | The United States and its territories |
| Links | |
| Website | www |
| Title list(s) | www |
Chronicling America is an open access, open source newspaper database and companion website. [1] [2] [3] It is produced by the United States National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. [4] [5] [6] The NDNP was founded in 2005. [7] The Chronicling America website was publicly launched in March 2007. [8] [9] [10] It is hosted by the Library of Congress. [11] [12] Much of the content hosted on Chronicling America is in the public domain. [13]
The database is searchable by key terms, state, language, time period, or newspaper. [7] [14] [12] The Chronicling America website contains digitized newspaper pages and information about historic newspapers to place the primary sources in context and support future research. [14] [15] [16] It hosts newspapers written in a variety of languages. [17] [13] In selecting newspapers to digitize, the site relies on the discretion of contributing institutions. [6]
The project describes itself as a "long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages." [15] Local participants in the project receive two-year grants to scan approximately 100,000 newspaper pages, primarily from microfilm. [15] [18] For newspapers that are not digitized, the website directs users to library locations that are known to have the desired records available. [3] [16]
The first series of newspaper digitization was completed with input from universities in 2007, and included public domain entries from six states and the District of Columbia. [16] The site was launched for public use In March 2007. [8] [9] [10]
In June 2009, the site added support for Web crawlers and API. In May 2011, the site added tools to share its digitized content on social media. [18] As of 2012, Chronicling America had over 5.2 million individual newspaper pages available for viewing and/or downloading, representing 801 titles from 32 states; though the project initially targeted newspapers from the 1900-1910 period, it had gradually expanded so that papers scanned currently span the years 1836-1922. Papers from 4 additional states (Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, and North Carolina) were then slated to be added to the collection, and grant-funded projects to scan papers from these states were then underway so that the material could be added to the site in 2013. [15] [19]
By 2014, the website hosted digital newspaper records from thirty-six states. [3] By October 2015, that number had risen to thirty-eight, and it had digitized over 10 million pages. [13] [20] [21] As of 2016, the database had expanded its coverage to include content ranging from 1690 to 1963. [22] [23] Geographically, its coverage had then expanded to 48 states and 2 United States territories. [22] As of 2021, that expanded to support digitization of records from all U.S. states and territories. [23] As of 2020, it had digitized 16.3 million pages. [5]
In August 2025 the Library of Congress upgraded to a new website for Chronicling America, with existing URLs automatically redirecting to the new address. [24] Changes include:
Chronicling America is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress in an effort to build a nationwide, open-access repository of digitized historic newspapers.