The ICON Database: New Data for Decision-making on Newspaper Digitization and Preservation

Libraries invest heavily to digitize to newspapers and spend millions to purchase databases of digitized historical newspapers from commercial publishers. At the same time, they are required to make weighty decisions about the disposition of original newspaper back files, which are rapidly disappearing. Unfortunately, these decisions are based on little hard information. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) major funding to expand its collecting and analysis of data on archived and digitized newspapers and, based on that data and analysis, to help create a common international agenda for newspaper digitization and preservation that is rational, strategic and achievable. At the center of this effort is CRL’s recently expanded ICON database.