July 12, 2017

WRITER: Mandy Mastrovita, mastrovi@uga.edu, 706-583-0209

CONTACT: Sheila McAlister, mcalists@uga.edu, 706-542-5418

New website devoted to Georgia historic newspapers available from the Digital Library of Georgia.

ATHENS, Ga. — The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is pleased to announce the launch of a brand-new website featuring historic newspaper titles from around the state. Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN), available at

http://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/

Since 2007, the Digital Library of Georgia has been providing access to the state’s historic newspapers through multiple, online city and regional newspaper archives. The DLG’s newest website, Georgia Historic Newspapers (GHN), continues that tradition by bringing together new and existing resources into a single, consolidated website.

“Historic newspapers provide a unique look at our state over time. They are invaluable to scholars and the general public alike as they provide in-depth coverage of Georgia counties and cities, report on the activities of state and local government, and reflect the social and cultural values of the time that they were created. By far, they are DLG’s most popular resources,” remarked Sheila McAlister, director of the Digital Library of Georgia. “We’re grateful for the assistance of our partners as we continue to add new content and improve how our users interact with these important historic documents.”

The GHN includes some of the state’s earliest newspapers; important African-American, Roman Catholic, and Cherokee newspapers; and issues from Augusta, Atlanta, Columbus, Fayetteville, Houston county, Louisville, Thomson, Sandersville, Waycross, and Waynesboro. The latest additions bring the total number of newspaper pages available free online through the DLG to 825,000 pages.

Like the older DLG newspaper sites, GHN provides newspaper issues that are full-text searchable and can be browsed by date and title.

Features of the new site include:

Essays about the publishing history of various newspaper titles,

Browsing by region (corresponding to regions of older sites), and

Browsing by types that include community papers, papers-of-record, African-American papers, religious papers, school papers, or Native American papers.

The site is compatible with all current browsers, and the newspaper page images can be viewed without the use of plug-ins or additional software downloads.

All previously digitized newspapers are scheduled to be incorporated into the new GHN platform. Until that time, users may continue to access the existing regional and city sites (North, South, West Georgia, Athens, Macon, Milledgeville, and Savannah). Milledgeville and the South Georgia historic newspapers are slated to be integrated into GHN next.

Digitization of the newspapers found in the initial launch of GHN was made possible through partnerships with the following organizations:

Flint Energies Foundation

Georgia HomePLACE/Georgia Public Library Service

Houston County Public Library System

R.J. Taylor, Jr. Foundation

Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah

Taylor County Historical-Genealogical Society

About the Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive

The Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a part of Georgia’s Virtual Library GALILEO and is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Since 2007, the DLG has partnered with universities, archives, public libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to digitize historical newspapers from around the state. The archive is free and open for public use.