The database is searchable by key terms, state, language, time period, or newspaper.[7][14][12] The Chronicling America website contains digitized newspaper pages and information about historic newspapers to place the primary sources in context and support future research.[14][15][16] It hosts newspapers written in a variety of languages.[17][13] In selecting newspapers to digitize, the site relies on the discretion of contributing institutions.[6]
The project describes itself as a "long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages."[15] Local participants in the project receive two-year grants to scan approximately 100,000 newspaper pages, primarily from microfilm.[15][18] For newspapers that are not digitized, the website directs users to library locations that are known to have the desired records available.[3][16]
History
The first series of newspaper digitization was completed with input from universities in 2007, and included public domain entries from six states and the District of Columbia.[16] The site was launched for public use In March 2007.[8][9][10]
In June 2009, the site added support for Web crawlers and API. In May 2011, the site added tools to share its digitized content on social media.[18] As of 2012, Chronicling America had over 5.2 million individual newspaper pages available for viewing and/or downloading, representing 801 titles from 32 states; though the project initially targeted newspapers from the 1900-1910 period, it had gradually expanded so that papers scanned currently span the years 1836-1922. Papers from 4 additional states (Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, and North Carolina) were then slated to be added to the collection, and grant-funded projects to scan papers from these states were then underway so that the material could be added to the site in 2013.[15][19]
By 2014, the website hosted digital newspaper records from thirty-six states.[3] By October 2015, that number had risen to thirty-eight, and it had digitized over 10 million pages.[13][20][21] As of 2016, the database had expanded its coverage to include content ranging from 1690 to 1963.[22][23] Geographically, its coverage had then expanded to 48 states and 2 United States territories.[22] As of 2021, that expanded to support digitization of records from all U.S. states and territories.[23] As of 2020, it had digitized 16.3 million pages.[5]
^ abLee, Benjamin Charles Germain; Mears, Jaime; Jakeway, Eileen; Ferriter, Meghan; Adams, Chris; Yarasavage, Nathan; Thomas, Deborah; Zwaard, Kate; Weld, Daniel S. (2020-10-19). "The Newspaper Navigator Dataset". Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management. CIKM 2020. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 3055–3062. doi:10.1145/3340531.3412767. ISBN978-1-4503-6859-9. S2CID224281641.