A collection of bookmarks for Washington Digital Newspapers. (Images courtesy of Shawn Schollmeyer)

Many history and newspaper buffs and students are fans of the State Library’s digital newspaper collections, which feature digitized versions of many Washington newspapers whose editions were published more than a century ago.

The latest “news” on the newspaper collections is the merging of two existing collections into a new one called “Washington Digital Newspapers,” which will give the public easier, full-text search (move over, Google!) access to these historic newspapers. You can browse titles or use the calendar view to search the combined collection here. It currently includes 46 titles and more than 306,000 newspaper pages, and it’s mobile friendly!

A recent addition to the collection is the Tacoma Evening Telegraph (1886). In August, The Eatonville Dispatch (1916-2010) will be added. More additions by the end of this year include the Centralia Daily Hub (1914-1916), Danske Kronike (Danish/English, 1916-1917), and Dat Moi (Vietnamese/English, 1974-1987). 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. And the Anacortes Museum just signed on to help digitize the Anacortes American for 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,” said Shawn Schollmeyer, who oversees the Washington Digital Newspapers program for the State Library. “We’re always excited to add new newspaper titles to our digital collection.”

Front page of the Tacoma Evening Telegraph in 1886.

The State Library’s newspaper collection includes current issues on paper and historic newspapers on microfilm with some searchable online. The library subscribes to about 125 daily and weekly newspapers throughout Washington, plus a few out-of-state papers. The microfilm collection consists of over 40,000 reels of newspapers dating from the 1850s to the present.

Washington Digital Newspapers combines titles from the Historic Newspapers in Washington collection, which covers Washington’s territorial and early statehood days, with titles digitized by the State Library as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program for inclusion in Chronicling America, an effort to digitize early (pre 1923) newspapers from over 30 states and territories in the U.S.