Digitizing South Dakota’s Newspapers

NEH funding has helped the South Dakota Digital Newspaper Project make historical papers like *The Daily Dakota Farmers' Leader* available online. Image courtesy of the South Dakota Digital Newspaper Project. — NEH funding has helped the South Dakota Digital Newspaper Project make historical papers like *The Daily Dakota Farmers’ Leader* available online. Image courtesy of the South Dakota Digital Newspaper Project.

Supported with NEH funding, the South Dakota Digital Newspaper Project is a significant contribution to a nationwide initiative, Chronicling America. By 2020, the South Dakota Digital Newspaper Project will have published more than 100,000 newspaper pages online. For the staff of the South Dakota Department of Education, which runs the program, enabling better access to remarkable newspaper collections is one of the most exciting components of the project. Prior to the NEH grant, many of these newspapers had been preserved on microfilm and, to access them, researchers had to travel to the state’s archives. Chelle Somsen, the program’s director, said, “we wouldn’t have been able to provide that level of access without the grant funds. Now that they are online, we are seeing our resources being used even more.”

The project’s direction is informed by a committee of journalists, publishers, and historians who ensure that a wide range of the state’s communities are represented. In addition to attending to geographic diversity, the project is digitizing many newspapers in languages other than English—these include German and Czech language newspapers, published by immigrant communities in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and Lakota language newspapers, which were published for the state’s indigenous population. Throughout the state, people are excited to see their local newspapers go online, with many communities requesting that their papers be digitized. And for the Department of Education staff, the program has proven professionally valuable, helping them build relationships with organizations like the Minnesota Historical Society and encouraging them to develop new skills in collections care and cataloging, which will serve them well in future projects.

A partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, Chronicling America is an online, openly accessible collection of digitized historical newspapers collected and preserved by every state. The collection chronicles the history of the United States from 1789 to 1963, showcasing our nation’s achievements and hardships through national and local papers. It is used by researchers, students, reporters, and others from around the world.