The Washington State Library (WSL) is on a mission to “Preserve and share Washington’s stories -employing digital initiatives and other preservation strategies to tell the stories of local communities and to celebrate our common heritage.”

In support of this journey, Veridian software has been selected to provide online access to its Washington Digital Newspapers collection.

The collection is made up of approximately 402,000 online newspaper pages and continues to grow by up to 100,000 pages per year. It is currently displayed via an open source viewing tool based on the Chronicling America platform.

In choosing Veridian, this important digital newspaper collection will gain an improved user experience that allows growth for long-term preservation and access. The collection website will be tailored to reflect OSOS branding and design in keeping with its other agency websites.

Users of the newspaper archive will be able to perform advanced searches and explore metadata-rich content. The content will be created using the Library of Congress’ METS/ALTO standards, as described in the 2018 National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) Technical Guidelines.

Shawn Schollmeyer, National Digital Newspaper Project Director at WSL says:

“We are excited about the opportunities Veridian has proposed and look forward to working with them for all our newspaper projects.”

“With a stable website we feel that we’ll be reaching more users and have a much better user experience for our researchers.”

Veridian engineers are now working to build the new and improved digital collection interface. Once completed, Veridian will host and maintain the Washington Digital Newspapers collection for 24/7 public access.

Watch this space!