Hoosier State Chronicles and the digital newspaper repositories

Indiana State Library, from 2011 — the free door into the state's papers

What it is: Hoosier State Chronicles is Indiana's digital historic newspaper program, operated by the Indiana State Library and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the Library Services and Technology Act. It began in 2011 with National Endowment for the Humanities funding, in partnership with the Indiana Historical Society, digitizing Indiana papers for the National Digital Newspaper Program; the NDNP titles also stand in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America. By its own current count the collection holds some 198,000 issues and 1.69 million pages, and the State Library's Newspaper Division behind it holds the largest collection of Indiana newspapers in any format. Its South Bend holding that mattered most to this build is the News-Times: the program brought roughly 50,000 pages of it online, and the Charities, Events, Veterans and Wars legs read the paper there.

Its standing, from this build's experience: the free door is a real door, and this history walked through it more than any other in this part of the file. Its limits are also documented, and both belong in the entry. The machine text under the page images can scramble past quoting: the News-Times Armistice story of 12 November 1918 was read on the front page and deliberately not quoted, because the text layer could not be trusted to carry it. And the door sticks: a direct fetch of the 20 August 1917 issue was refused (an HTTP 403), and by this build's rule a refusal is not retried in disguise — the Mysteries leg worked the program's index instead and printed the case at the size the index allowed. Two neighbouring doors should be named beside it: the Chicago Daily Tribune of 12 September 1923, which carries the settled citation for the Klan letter in the Controversies record, is paywalled and was printed attributed, not read in full; and WNDU's site, whose Michiana Unsolved segments the Unsolved leg needed, is blocked to this build's reading tools — the segments were read through the station's own CDN mirrors and the reporter's index, and the one segment whose details could not be recovered (a Spanish-language account) is named in that file as its first next-pass pull.

Sources:

1. Hoosier State Chronicles, about page and program blog (Indiana State Library) — operation, funding, NDNP partnership, collection counts, the News-Times digitization.