Making News Usage Tangible: An Exploratory Analysis of Usage Patterns in the Texas Digital Newspaper Program

University of North Texas Libraries have been collecting, digitizing, and making accessible newspapers from around the State of Texas since 2009 and using them to build the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP). As the largest collection on The Portal to Texas History, these 980,000 newspaper issues comprise nearly half of the Portal's 2 million publicly-available items. This paper presents the outcome of an exploratory analysis of usage data for the TDNP collection, spanning 2009 to present and representing over 48 million total use events.