THE CALIFORNIA NEWSPAPER PROJECT:CANVASSING, CATALOGING, PRESERVATION,DIGITIZATION

摘要

The California Newspaper Project is a component of the United States Newspaper Project (USNP), a massive effort to record the surviving issues of newspapers published in the United States and ensure their preservation for future generations. Initially the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected ten major repositories to inventory their collections, thus creating a base file. The records were loaded into CONSER, the national serials data base maintained by OCLC. Now, two decades later, projects have been spon-sored in all states and territories and the District of Columbia. I believe all are finished except for New York, Pennsylvania and California. California has the third largest project (after New York and Illinois) in terms of total number of titles recovered and second (after Texas) in terms of geographical area. As of the first of this year we had created or edited 8,772 records for California titles and 5,565 for out-of-state titles held in California repos-itories. Our working file which includes entries not yet verified, some for which no copy survives, and some duplicates, totals 18,510. We have verified a total of 42,171 holdings records to date. We have visited over 1,400 institutions, some many times.The main office of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR), which houses the project, is located at the University of California, Riverside. In addition to the CNP the Center (cbsr.ucr.edu) manages the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC) in North America, CCILA, a union catalog of Latin American imprints to 1851, and the Burney Newspaper Digitization Project, conducted in partnership with the British Library. The ESTC is a joint venture with the British Library and the American Antiquarian Society.