For 2022, the IFLA News Media section will offer blog posts by its section members, related to projects or work that they complete in their professional lives. The News Media Section members serve IFLA in the service roles of their regular jobs. For instance, a librarian working in a university library may be required to offer a certain percentage of professional service each year, on top of their regularly-assigned duties–and the News Media section is lucky enough to receive the support and service of these very generous professionals.
News Media Section members represent national, academic, and public libraries, and vendors who support these libraries, as well as educational institutions dedicated to teaching in some form of news-related field, including Journalism and Rhetoric, from across the world. This series of blog posts will explore the work these people do with news media of all kinds, on a day-to-day basis.
My name is Ana Krahmer, and I am a librarian from the University of North Texas who manages a department of 3 full-time staff members and between 12 and 15 student workers. Our daily work is to digitize and digitally preserve newspaper content. We build access to this newspaper collection through the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP), via The Portal to Texas History. This is an open access gateway to Texas history materials from any date and location in the state. The newspaper collection spans from 1813 to the present day, including newspapers digitized from microfilm, physical page, and by local partnering groups, as well as newspapers digitally preserved and accessible from PDF master editions.
While TDNP is a local collection hosted on the Portal, we also contribute newspapers to the U.S.’s National Digital Newspaper Program site, Chronicling America. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this national program has enabled addition of newspapers from across all 50 U.S. states, as well as territories including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, NDNP has provided technological training and professional communication opportunities across the U.S. for newspaper digitization and preservation, and UNT has been a contributing institution since 2007 for Texas newspapers, providing just over 500,000 Texas newspapers to Chronicling America.* To give a sense of the scopes of TDNP and of Chronicling America, TDNP is approaching 9 million pages of Texas newspapers available, while ChronAm is just under 19.5 million pages of newspapers.
The size of the Texas Digital Newspaper Program collection is representative of Texas itself. Texas is a very large state, comprising 268,597 square miles, with many remote rural areas where newspaper publishing has flourished over time, representing local identities and serving as the public organ for local community voices. Half to two-thirds of my job requires extensive outreach to partners across the state. My own unit is primarily externally funded, so this involves external support and outreach on my part, communicating with granting agencies (federal, statewide, and private foundations) and public libraries in preparing grant applications. The newspaper publication history of Texas is tremendous, spanning over 200 years, representing approximately 2100 titles over time, and I heavily draw from my educational background in Technical Communication & Rhetoric in this part of the job.
Another large part of my work entails managing different technologies and processes for newspaper digitization here. For those of you reading this who know what the OAIS Reference Model is, my team’s work involves preparing SIPs out of newspapers, and it’s my responsibility to ensure everyone is able to complete their respective work at different stages–one person might need to use a large-format, planetary scanner and will need help troubleshooting it; another person might need to work with Photoshop to correct a skewed page; another person might need help figuring out why JEdit is having trouble on batch-metadata editing. This type of work involves troubleshooting and technological skills, and it heavily takes advantage of my own past life as an IT administrator.
The success of the Texas Digital Newspaper Program, the largest, single-state, open access repository of digital newspapers in the U.S., is largely due to the tremendous team of people I have the opportunity to work with. Sarah Lynn Fisher coordinates our National Digital Newspaper Program arm, and in her work, she has facilitated addition of not only Texas newspapers to Chronicling America, but also Oklahoma and New Mexico newspapers. In addition, Fisher oversees batch metadata creation for newspapers on the Gateway to Oklahoma History, a partner project University of North Texas runs in coordination with the Oklahoma Historical Society. Tim Gieringer manages all stages of TDNP newspaper metadata, including student training in issue-level preparation, as well as batch-metadata creation for Texas newspapers. Through this, Gieringer manages a team of between 4 and 6 student assistants, and they are responsible for stages immediately after scanning, as they organize newspaper page files into issues with necessary issue-level metadata. Brooke Edsall manages the physical newspaper and imaging area, in which she oversees a team of 4-6 student workers on inventorying and arranging the newspaper pages, archivally boxing them, and preparing them for actual scanning. In this work, Edsall wears two hats, training student workers in handling and working with a wide variety of physical newspaper pages, as well as in working with complex, large-format scanning equipment.
The Texas Digital Newspaper Program is enormous because enthusiasm for newspaper collection access is very high in Texas. I am extremely proud of the team of people I get to work with and of the work we do here at University of North Texas Libraries.
*I discuss Chronicling America in this post because anyone from the U.S. who works with newspapers in the U.S. can shorthand this explanation if they contribute a blog post to this.
IFLA Newspapers Section 
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