[Preservenw] RFPs-Cooperative Agreements for the National Digital Newspaper Program

[Gary Menges]

National Endowment for the Humanities:
Division of Preservation and Access

Request for Proposals-Cooperative Agreements for the National Digital 
Newspaper Program (A Partnership between NEH and the Library of Congress)

URL: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/ndnp.html

Program Overview

·	Award amount: up to $400,000
·	Deadline for submission: November 1, 2006
·	Award announcement: July 2007
·	Grant period: 2 years beginning July 2007


The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is soliciting proposals 
from institutions to participate in the next phase of the National Digital 
Newspaper Program (NDNP). Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 
years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically 
significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published 
between 1836 and 1922.  This searchable database will be permanently 
maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via 
the Internet. An accompanying national newspaper directory of 
bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users to 
newspaper titles available in all types of formats. LC will also digitize 
and contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper 
pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership 
between NEH and the Library.

NDNP will be implemented in several phases.  The program began its 
development phase in May 2005 with awards to six state projects that are 
selecting newspapers published in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, 
Utah, and Virginia during the decade of 1900 to 1910.  NDNP's 
chronological coverage will be expanded in successive phases, starting 
with the late nineteenth century and eventually going back to the 1830s. 
The Endowment intends to support additional projects in all states and 
U.S. territories, provided that sufficient funds allocated for this 
purpose are available. One organization within each U.S. state or 
territory will receive an award to collaborate with relevant state 
partners in this effort. Previously funded projects will be eligible for 
continued support to digitize pages from new decades.

Successful applicants for the next phase of NDNP will select newspapers 
published in English within their state between 1880 and 1910 and convert, 
primarily from microfilm, over a period of two years, a minimum of 100,000 
pages into digital files, according to the technical guidelines outlined 
by the Library of Congress.

NDNP builds on the foundation established by an earlier NEH initiative: 
the United States Newspaper Program (USNP). Since 1982, the Endowment has 
supported a cooperative, national effort to locate, catalog, and preserve 
on microfilm American newspapers published from the 18th century to the 
present. NEH has funded newspaper projects in all the fifty states, the 
District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. When completed 
in 2007, USNP will have provided bibliographic control to widely scattered 
newspapers and have preserved on microfilm (to consistent national 
standards) selected titles from this vulnerable corpus. LC has provided 
technical assistance for the USNP since its inception.

NEH expects to award two-year cooperative agreements (of up to $400,000 
each), depending on the availability of funds. The Guidelines for the 
Request for Proposals are located at: 
http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/ndnp.html . LC's technical guidelines 
are found at: http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/pdf/NDNP_200709TechNotes.pdf .

For information about the application process, contact the Division of 
Preservation and Access at 202-606-8570 or e-mail at preservation at neh.gov. 
The postal address is:

National Digital Newspaper Program
Division of Preservation and Access
Room 411
National Endowment for the Humanities
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20506

Hearing-impaired applicants can contact NEH via TDD at 1-866-372-2930.

All questions relating to the technical guidelines should be directed to 
LC staff at ndnptech at loc.gov.

>>>>>>>>>

Laura Gottesman
Reference Specialist
Digital Reference Team
Library of Congress