NEH to fund USC project to make historic South Carolina newspapers available via Web

June 23, 2009

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the University of South Carolina libraries a $350,000 grant to make many late 19th- and early 20th-century South Carolina newspapers accessible via the Web.

The South Carolina Digital Newspaper Project calls for the scanning, enhancing and delivering to the Library of Congress an estimated 100,000 pages from select newspapers in the state from 1860 – 1922 that capture the artistic, literary, cultural, economic and political events of South Carolina and surrounding states.

For more than 200 years, librarians have acquired, collected, preserved and made accessible manuscripts and printed materials at the South Caroliniana Library, said Kate Boyd, the university’s librarian of digital collections. I hope that that next step towards even more accessibility to South Carolina newspapers will capture people’s interest from around the world in South Carolina and American history. We are excited to bring these invaluable primary resources to the people through free access on the Web.

On June 16, the NEH announced the millionth historic newspaper page in its National Digital Newspaper Program and the expansion of the program to seven more states, including South Carolina. For more information on the program, visit the Web site: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

This isn’t the first NEH grant to University Libraries to make South Carolina newspapers more accessible. A grant in the 1980s called for an exhaustive inventory of the state’s newspapers, which culminated in the county-by-county reference book. A second grant in the 1990s called for the cataloging of 1,249 newspaper titles and the filming of 990,332 pages.

The South Carolina Digital Newspaper Project will address a fascinating chapter of South Carolina publishing history from 1860 – 1922. Newspaper publishing in South Carolina during Reconstruction (1865-77) saw the emergence of papers published by former ruling elites (Democrats), recently freed African Americans and reformers from the North. By the early 20th century, four major daily newspapers – The State (Columbia), the News and Courier (Charleston; now Post and Courier), the Greenville Daily News (now Greenville News) and the Daily Herald (Spartanburg; now Spartanburg Herald-Journal) – covered local, regional and national news for the state’s inhabitants. Other notable papers of the era included the Sumter Herald, the Camden Chronicle and the Aiken Journal and Review.

By 1920, approximately 100 newspapers were being published concurrently in South Carolina.

The University Libraries’  Digital Activities Center creates digital collections and makes them available in support of scholarship, research and teaching. For more information, visit the University Libraries Web site – http://www.sc.edu/libraries/ – and click Digital Collections.