National Digital Newspaper Program | 20180111 PJ

Opportunity Information: Apply for 20180111 PJ

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a cooperative effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress designed to build a long-term, nationwide digital collection of historically significant U.S. newspapers. The program focuses on newspapers published from 1690 through 1963 and aims to represent every U.S. state and territory. The core public outcome is a large, searchable online database that is permanently maintained by the Library of Congress and made freely available to anyone through the Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers website. Alongside the digitized pages, the program also supports a national directory that provides bibliographic details and holdings information, helping researchers locate newspaper titles across formats and repositories, not just online.

At the project level, NDNP awards typically go to one lead organization within a given state or territory, which then coordinates with relevant partners such as state libraries, archives, historical societies, universities, and other local stakeholders. Funded work centers on selecting appropriate newspaper titles and date ranges, digitizing pages to program specifications, creating or enhancing metadata, and delivering the final digital files for public access through the Library of Congress platform. In parallel with the state and territory awards, the Library of Congress also contributes substantially by digitizing newspaper pages from its own collections and adding them to the same national resource, helping accelerate coverage and breadth.

The program has already engaged a large portion of the country: forty-five states and one territory have participated, with prior recipients including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Even with that progress, NEH states that it intends to support projects in all states and U.S. territories, and it explicitly prioritizes applications from places that have not yet received NDNP funding or that have received fewer than three awards.

A key feature of NDNP is its multi-award pathway for each participating state or territory. After an initial award, partners are encouraged to return for second and third awards, with an overall target of producing about 300,000 digitized newspaper pages per state. Continued support beyond a third award may be possible, but the program balances that continuity against the goal of bringing in new states and territories and helping under-funded jurisdictions catch up. In practice, this structure pushes applicants to plan in phases: building capacity and workflows early, then scaling production and expanding title coverage over subsequent funding rounds.

Administratively, this opportunity is offered by NEH as a discretionary humanities grant using a cooperative agreement mechanism, reflecting that the work is closely coordinated with federal partners and must align with national standards and integration requirements. The listed opportunity number is 20180111 PJ under CFDA 45.149, with an award ceiling of $325,000. Eligible applicants are broad and include state, county, and local governments; special district governments; public and state-controlled institutions of higher education; private institutions of higher education; federally recognized Native American tribal governments; and nonprofit organizations with IRS 501(c)(3) status (other than institutions of higher education). The posting indicates a closing date of 2018-01-11 and a creation date of 2017-11-08, which are useful as historical reference points for this specific notice, even though NDNP cycles may be updated over time.

Overall, NDNP is best understood as a national infrastructure-building effort in the humanities: it funds state and territorial partners to digitize historically important newspapers within a defined time period, standardizes and aggregates that content into a single, permanent, publicly accessible Library of Congress repository, and simultaneously improves discovery through a comprehensive directory of newspaper holdings. The intended impact is long-term preservation, broad public access, and dramatically improved searchability for historians, students, genealogists, journalists, and community members seeking primary-source newspaper evidence of American life over nearly three centuries.

• The National Endowment for the Humanities in the humanities sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "National Digital Newspaper Program" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 45.149.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2017-11-08.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2018-01-11. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $325,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education.

Apply for 20180111 PJ

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