A new $310,000 grant will allow UF to digitize thousands of pages of old newspapers from Florida and Puerto Rico.
The grant comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and will digitize 300,000 pages of historically significant newspapers.
UF is collaborating with the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. The newspapers will be in both English and Spanish, with issues spanning from 1836 to 1922.
Only historically significant papers will be digitized, said Patrick Reakes, the associate dean of scholarly resources and services and director of the project. An advisory board will determine what is historically significant by looking at location and time period. Newspapers of record, like the Associated Press, are strongly considered, said Melissa Jerome, the project manager.
The papers cover a broad range of topics including the Caribbean, the citrus industry, trains, hurricanes, politics, women’s suffrage and World War I, Jerome and Reakes said.
“Besides all of the news you read about big events or historical figures, one of my favorite things is going through the pages and finding oddities, like random odd news that you’d find,” Jerome said. “Not too long ago, we stumbled across an article about ostrich racing in Florida.”
Anyone with internet access can retrieve the papers, which allows UF to move away from aging microfilm, Reakes said.
About 211,900 pages of digitized newspapers are already available.
“(Through newspapers) you get that first blush of history that you don’t get anywhere else,” Reakes said.
@Christina_M18
cmorales@alligator.org
