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Two newspaper digitization projects will improve and expand access to historical Montana newspapers, which is one of the most used collections at the Montana Historical Society (MTHS).
This latest project through the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) makes more than 100,000 pages available online for free and includes newspapers from towns on or near reservations in Montana.
This is the fifth time the MTHS received a grant to be part of the NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to enhance access to historical American newspapers.
“The project we just completed includes newspapers from Browning, Harlem, Hot Springs, and Poplar, marking the first time that papers from these towns are accessible and searchable online,” noted Library Manager Dan Karalus, who headed the project.
Montana newspapers from all the NDNP projects, totaling more than 400,000 pages, are available on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website http://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/.
The second project, a partnership with Newspapers.com, included digitizing 5,000-plus microfilm reels of newspapers from more than 200 Montana cities and towns.
The MTHS now offers a free Public Access Portal where online users can search through nearly 2.5 million pages of historical Montana newspapers. The portal includes all the content migrated from its Montana Newspapers website, most material from Chronicling America, and some newly digitized newspapers in the public domain.
The portal replaces the Montana Newspapers website, which the MTHS plans to shut down in early 2024, saving significant costs. To access the new portal, go to mths.mt.gov/Research/collections/newspapers/mtnews and click on the Newspapers.com Public Access Portal link.
When the MTHS reopens to the public, visitors to the Library & Archives will have free access to more than 12 million newspaper pages and more than 650 titles via the Newspapers.com Onsite Portal, available in person in the Reference Room. The available papers include short-lived titles, like the Flaxville Democrat and its three issues published in 1920, and some of the longest-running papers in the state, such as The Madisonian out of Virginia City, which has 150 years of digitized issues.
Today, the MTHS can offer digital access to newspapers published in every Montana county.
“This is huge,” Karalus said. “Researchers used to visit us and spend hours scrolling through microfilm. But when we reopen in 2025, they can come here and just do a keyword search.”
Karalus adds that this improves access and preservation, as the microfilm collection will see less use. “We will still have to use microfilm for some more recent papers under copyright, but we probably won’t hear the microfilm readers rewinding as often,” he said.
As part of the MTHS agreement with Newspapers.com, the company performed the digitization work in exchange for access rights for a period of three years. After that time, digitized newspapers in the public domain will shift over to the Public Access Portal and be available online from anywhere.
Individuals with research questions may submit a research request via the MTHS website mhs.mt.gov/Research/ResearchRequests or by e-mail to [email protected].
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