About the New York State Newspaper Project
The United States Newspaper Program
(USNP) was a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Funding was provided in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities (from 1982 to 2011). The USNP has supported projects in each of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The New York State Newspaper Project, which ran from March 1987 through January 2007, was administered by the New York State Library and carried out through nine regional projects based on the state's Reference and Research Library Resources Systems.
The Project's bibliographic activity consisted of:
- a detailed inventory of newspaper collections throughout the state,
- CONSER cataloging into the OCLC Online Union Catalog, and
- the entry of holdings into the United States Newspaper Program union list.
Between March 1987 and October 2004, the Project:
- inventoried 1,759 newspaper repositories,
- cataloged 22,785 distinct newspaper titles, with 10,537 of those published in New York State, and
- created 66,065 local holdings records with issue specific data.
Preservation microfilming was done in accordance with American National Standards Institute and Association for Information and Image Management standards. The Project microfilmed over 4.37 million pages of New York State newspapers amounting to 6,905 rolls of film between July 1991 and August 2006. The microfilm was added to the State Library's collection and is available on-site to patrons and through interlibrary loan. A copy of the film was also provided at no cost to the institution loaning the newspapers.
The Newspaper Project's statewide inventory improved bibliographic access to once unknown newspaper collections. Microfilming provides not only a long-term, safe storage medium but unparalleled access through interlibrary loan, guaranteeing the future to New York State's past.