Born-Digital News in Ohio: What Is (and Isn’t) Happening

The Ohio History Connection (OHC) manages the Ohio Digital Newspaper Program and leads both newspaper preservation and digitization efforts in the state. To date, we have digitized over half a million pages of Ohio newspapers for the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America and Ohio Memory, the collaborative digital library of OHC and the State Library of Ohio. OHC also hosts nearly 100,000 pages of additional newspaper content, but only a small percentage of this is born-digital. OHC has not yet developed a program to ingest and preserve born-digital content on a large scale, and other institutions and newspaper publishers around the state are not largely engaged in this type of activity. When they are, it is typically focused on their specific communities (neighborhood, town, university, etc.). This paper will provide an overview of the current state of OHC and Ohio’s efforts to preserve born-digital and other newspaper content: Who is participating in these activities? Why or why not? If they are preserving born-digital content, what systems, staff, workflow and funding supports this work? What is the best way to preserve Ohio’s newspapers for future generations? In addition, the paper will include a discussion of current barriers to making this a proactive and collaborative effort between stakeholders across the state, such as OHC, the Ohio Newspaper Association, academic institutions, individual publishers, public libraries and other organizations.