UF libraries announce plan to expand newspaper digitization

UF’s George A. Smathers libraries announced a rebranding of their $1.2 million newspaper digitization project, The Florida and Puerto Rico Digital Newspaper Project (FPRDNP), Wednesday across their social media accounts. 

The project will now be called the U.S. Caribbean & Ethnic Florida Newspaper Project (USCEFNP) and will expand the scope of the project to include newspapers published in the Virgin Islands, according to a press release. It will also continue efforts to digitize newspapers in Florida and Puerto Rico, with a focus on ethnic newspapers in Florida.

The project will be funded by a $309,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which also gave UF $923,000 to fund the FPRDNP, and will run until Aug. 31, 2021, said project coordinator Melissa Jerome. UF will work alongside the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras and the University of the Virgin Islands to digitize 100,000 pages of historic newspapers.