Arizona State Library awarded $315K federal grant

National Endowment for the Humanities award will fund digitization of historic Arizona newspapers

PHOENIX – The Wild West may be gone, but it will live on through the digitization of historic Arizona newspapers published between 1860 and 1922.

The Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records has received a $314,790 federal grant to continue efforts to digitize and preserve historic newspapers. The funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities is especially critical because it will be applied toward digitization of newspapers that documented the four decades that immediately preceded Arizona Statehood in 1912, as well as the state's formative years that followed.

“It's often said that newspapers are a rough draft of history. By digitizing these historic newspapers, Arizona residents will be able to see what was being written and said about their state during its territorial days and immediately following Statehood,” said State Librarian GladysAnn Wells. “This grant truly is a wonderful gift as we approach Arizona's Centennial celebration.”

The funding follows a 2008 grant of $400,000, which the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the State Library for the same purpose of newspaper digitization. Publications already digitized, as well as those that will be in the months to come, can be viewed at the Chronicling America section of the Library of Congress' Website: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers.

It is hoped that the newspaper digitization project will directly contribute to Arizonans' understanding of their state's rich history. Once more of the digitization has been completed, the State Library will make the information available on its own Website through the Arizona Memory Project: http://azmemory.lib.az.us.

For more information regarding the Arizona newspapers project or the National Endowment for the Humanities grant, please contact Ted Hale, development manager for the State Library, at thale@lib.az.us, or visit www.lib.az.us.