California Digital Newspaper Collection


The California Digital Newspaper Collection is a freely-available archive of digitized California newspapers; it is accessible through the project's website. The collection contains over six million pages from over 50 million articles. The project is part of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California Riverside. Due to funding issues, the website went offline in September 2025., the website was operational.

History

The Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research was one of six initial participants in the National Digital Newspaper Program, a newspaper digitization project established from a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Between 2005 and 2011, the CBSR received three two-year grants, and contributed around 300,000 pages to Chronicling America, the public face of the NDNP.
Published newspaper titles submitted include the San Francisco Call, Los Angeles Daily Herald, Amador Ledger, and the Imperial Valley Press. In 2015, the CBSR received a fourth grant from the National Digital Newspaper Project. Between 2015 and 2017, the project contributed another 100,000 pages from the Gold Rush era, as well as foreign-language newspapers.
The California Digital Newspaper Collection was officially launched in 2007, and contained the initial 100,000 pages produced for the National Digital Newspaper Project from 2005 to 2007. In 2008, the CDNC was selected as a recipient of the Larry L. Sautter Silver Award for Achievement in University Computing.
Another 50,000 pages were created, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act , administered in California by the State Librarian. All content contributed to NDNP is also hosted in the CDNC, with important differences, noted below in Digitization.
Between 2007 and 2013, the CDNC digitized roughly 300,000 pages through the LSTA program, administered by the California State Library. In 2014, the project announced a five-year plan, supported by LSTA, to digitize one title per county, up through 1923.
In 2010, the CDNC initiated the "Born Digital Project", with the goal to collect and host contemporary PDFs from newspaper publishers. Roughly a dozen publishers have participated in the project.
, the CDNC gets 150,000 unique monthly online visitors from academics, amateur historians, genealogists, schoolteachers, et al.
In January 2025, the CDNC was notified that California was withholding their annual appropriation of $430,000 for their 2024–2025 budget. In April 2025, CDNC director Brian Geiger said they needed to raise at least $300,000 to keep the archival site operational, and if they were unable to raise the funds, there is the possibility the site could go offline. The state budget cuts are a result of the national budget cuts to libraries. In July, UCR announced that state and federal funding had been restored and Daryle Williams, dean of the UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences issued a statement, dated July 11, saying “UCR is actively working on a sustainable model for the CDNC to continue to be available to the public. Effective July 1, 2025, the Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research functions under the direct oversight of the Office of the Dean within the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.” However, CBSR staff members had all been laid off on June 27. Geiger expressed confusion at the dean's statement. “There's really no CBSR there anymore,” he said. Operations were suspended July 1, 2025. The last progress update was posted August 13, 2025. In mid-September the CDNC website was offline., the website was operational.

Digitization

The California Digital Newspaper Collection follows standards established by the National Digital Newspaper Program. Microfilm or newsprint is scanned to create TIFF images; whenever possible, master negative film is used. The CBSR manages an archive of approximately 100,000 reels of negative film. These are stored and maintained by the Microfilm Archive">Microform">Microfilm Archive. When negative film is unavailable, positive can be used, but image quality and OCR will not be as good.
The TIFF images are then processed or "digitized" to create derivative files, including a JP2, PDF, and METS/ALTO XML for each page.
Unlike NDNP, the CDNC has traditionally digitized to article-level rather than just page-level. Individual "segments" on a page—articles, illustrations, advertisements, etc.—are identified during digitization and can be retrieved by the researcher. For an illustration of the difference between page- and article-level, compare the San Francisco Call in the CDNC to the same title in Chronicling America.
Recently the CDNC has begun digitizing some titles to page-level, but most are still article-level. The main advantage of page-level is lower cost when done in an automated fashion, without human input.
With the CBSR staff layoffs at the end of June 2025, it is not clear if any of the digitization projects that was put on hold would ever resume without finding new funding sources.

Papers covered