From attic to online

As one of four regional sites established to participate in the United States Newspaper Program for the state of Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s, the Central Field Office was assigned the task to survey and travel to towns and cities in 30 of the state’s 67 counties, in the rural, remote areas in Central and Northeastern Pennsylvania, to locate and catalog all newspapers that could be found. The systematic process the Project Team established yielded extraordinary discoveries and significant runs of presumed lost titles from once thriving towns and communities. By the end of their 30-county assignment in 1988, the Team had discovered that an astonishing number of titles were held in the hands of private citizens and newspaper publishers, who represented 59% of the sites visited, or over half. What the Team accomplished in rural Pennsylvania, including recommending many of these titles for microfilming, ultimately laid the groundwork for the digitization efforts now underway as part of Pennsylvania's involvement in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). By 2014 an estimated 350,000 pages of Pennsylvania newspapers, including many found in private hands, will be freely accessible online, meaning for these papers their journey from "attic to online" is complete. This paper chronicles the innovative field work conducted by the Central Field Office Project Team in rural Pennsylvania as they cultivated relationships within communities and with private citizens in their attempt to seek, find, and ultimately gain access to previously unknown and rare newspaper collections.