[PADG:1159] RFPs-Cooperative Agreements for the National Digital Newspaper Program

["Laura Gottesman" <lgot@xxxxxxx>]

Posted on behalf of colleagues.  Please excuse any cross postings and forward as appropriate. 
Thank you!
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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@xxxxxxxx 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@xxxxxxxx

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Laura Gottesman
Reference Specialist
Digital Reference Team
Library of Congress