Since its launch in 2014, New York State Historic Newspapers has provided free access to a wide range of newspapers chosen to reflect New York’s unique history. This now includes 920 titles from all 62 counties comprising over 11.7 million pages of historical content. In these years, the content has been hosted on servers located in our offices in Potsdam, New York. We weathered ice storms, blizzards, power outages, internet blackouts, hacker attacks and hardware failures to provide access for visitors from across the country and world.
A large part of our success over the years has been you: our contributors. We have over 160 contributing organizations from small historical associations and museums to large universities and the New York State Library. Our contributors’ passion to get this content online has inspired us, driven us to do more and push through challenges. That passion and inspiration continues to drive us as we look to the future of the project.
In support of that future, we have contracted with Veridian (veridiansoftware.com). Veridian provides a robust online interface for searching, viewing and enjoying newspaper content. They will bolster our project by providing hosting and expertise in scaling our online presence so that more visitors will have fast and stable access to our collection. In addition, Veridian has new features to make research easier that we know our visitors will enjoy.
Here’s some details that are important to note:
- Starting in February 2023, any content in queue for addition to the current site will be uploaded to the new site only. No additional content will be added to the current site moving forward.
- We expect the new site to be live by November of this year, maybe even sooner, if all goes according to plan.
- During the migration process our microfilm digitization service will continue to operate as usual.
- Starting in February 2023 our pricing will be changing slightly:
- We’re increasing our per page rate for microfilm digitization to $0.18 to offset expenses. We still recommend that when planning for digitization projects that you continue to reach out to us for a quote (digitization@nnyln.org) so that you can accurately estimate costs. Any quotes issued before February 2023 will be honored as is!
- We’ll now be charging a small fee of 1 cent per image for ingesting and hosting files that are sent to us already digitized and meeting our file specifications. This is a change from our previous practice. Any projects received before February 2023 will be exempt from this fee.
- The current website will stay live with a prominent link to the new site when available, encouraging users to explore and transition to the new interface. We will run the two sites concurrently for a time until we’ve given users a chance to get comfortable with the new site. An exact cutover date will be decided later. The Veridian software offers significant improvements/enhancements, especially to the search engine, plus it will have more content, so users will have good reason to embrace it.
- We have a newsletter for NYS Historic Newspapers that will disseminate updates as we go through this process. Sign up by entering your contact info and clicking the box next to ‘NYS Historic Newspaper Newsletter’.
If you have any questions or concerns please let us know by emailing feedback@nnyln.org!
We’re excited about this new phase of this project! We believe that Veridian will allow us to focus our energy on finding new contributors and content while continuing to provide a great stable, fast and free search interface. Thanks for your continued passion and inspiration!