Digitizing Rhode Island's historic newspapers

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

An exciting project I’ll be helping out with a bit: U.S. Sen. Jack Reed has announced that $250,000 in federal funding “will help support an ongoing partnership between Providence Public Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) to complete an extensive newspaper digitization project that will celebrate and honor Rhode Island’s rich history by preserving historic newspapers and converting their contents into digital files. 

“The funds are being awarded as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress to create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 from all the states and U.S. territories available through the Library of Congress for the first time in history.’’

That Rhode Island’s history is so long and rich -- with so  many striking  and still controversial events and vivid personalities -- will make this project exciting and create a very useful new resource for historians and other citizens, even as physical newspapers continue to disappear.