From the desk of Shawn Schollmeyer

The latest “news” on the newspaper collections is the merging of two existing collections into a new one called “Washington Digital Newspapers,” (WDN) which will give the public easier, full-text search access to these historic newspapers (move over, Google!). You can now browse titles, view by calendar date or pick a location from a map to search the issues here. The collection currently includes more than 45 titles and over 306,000 newspaper pages. Now it’s also mobile friendly so you can research with your smart phone or tablet device!

The website will also feature some more recent issues of the Eatonville Dispatch (1916-2010), our current digitization project due to be included this fall. Most of the newspapers will be pre-1923, which are considered “public domain” available for students and teachers to download for school research projects without worrying about requesting copyright permissions for use. We’ll be rolling in our earliest pioneer & territorial titles from the Historic Online Newspapers collection, which is currently indexed by subject and proper names, so it too will be full-text searchable over the next couple years.

A recent addition to the collection is the Tacoma Evening Telegraph (1886-1887). More additions by the end of this year include the Centralia Daily Hub (1914-1916), Spokane’s Danske Kronike (Danish/English, 1916-1917), and Dat Moi (Vietnamese/English, 1974-1987). Washington State Library staff will add at least 40,000 pages of new content by end of this year, content that hasn’t appeared in any of the library’s earlier digital collections or on Chronicling America. Just this month the Anacortes Museum signed on to help us digitize the Anacortes American in 2017!

The Washington State Library is a rich resource of information for students, genealogists, researchers and history enthusiasts as one of the best `go-to’ places to find Washington newspapers. We have the largest selection of Washington newspapers on microfilm and we’re excited to be a new associate member of the Washington Newspaper Publishers’ Association. This fall we will be meeting with newspaper publishers and editors to help ensure that our history and culture will be best preserved in  newspapers from print, microfilm and into the born-digital world of current news media!