UF Libraries receives award for
National Digital Newspaper Project: Florida
The University of Florida Libraries has received an award from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) for the National Digital Newspaper Project: Florida. The highly competitive $320,959 award will digitize and make available approximately 50 Florida newspaper titles to the National Digital Newspaper Project based at the Library of Congress. These titles, dating from 1900-1910, represent all of Florida’s major geographic regions and localities including county seats, other major cities and selected smaller municipalities.
This phase of the project constitutes a two-year development pilot. Only ten of the state-based U.S. Newspaper Project institutions, including the University of Florida, are involved in this phase.
The University of Florida will target 120,000 newspaper pages in 60,000 frames of microfilm on approximately 200 reels.
James Cusick, curator of the UF’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, said that since the 1940s, the UF Library has been at the forefront of preserving Florida's newspapers. With the help of NEH, and the perseverance of UF's Digital Library Center, which has long fought for digitizing our historic press, the library moves forward into a new age and a new media for protecting these essential documents.
“My expectation is that we will see even greater public use of the newspaper collection as it is transferred into digital format,” Cusick added.
The significance of the decade 1900-1910
The newspapers of 1900 through 1910 hold the history of a developing Florida and a developing nation that saw Florida as its playground, ate from its table, and invested heavily in its fortunes. The newspapers reported events of local, state and national importance.
Of importance within Florida, newspapers reported on the political careers of William Sherman Jennings (Governor, 1901-1905) and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (State Representative, 1901; Health Commissioner, 1901-1904; Governor, 1905-1919; U.S. Senator, 1910). The growth and general health of agriculture was a popular topic.
By far the most important event of the decade in Florida history to be reported was the Great Fire of 1901 that destroyed Jacksonville, then Florida’s largest, most industrial and most vibrant city. Many of the state’s influential newspapers of the decade 1900-1910 were published in Jacksonville. Jacksonville’s reconstruction and the ascendancy of its rivals during this period – Key West, Miami, Pensacola and Tampa – are well documented in these newspapers.
Other disasters reported in the newspapers of the decade were the 1909 hurricane that came ashore in the Florida panhandle near Tallahassee. It’s devastating forces cut a northwesterly path to Pensacola. No part of the panhandle was left untouched. A 1906 hurricane deeply scarred Kay West, ripped into Miami, and nearly wiped cities like Boca Raton and Palm Beach from the map. Today, yesterday’s weather news is important in modeling the behaviors of present-day storms. This information has enduring economic value to Florida.
In addition to carrying train schedules, Florida newspapers reported on rail transportation; the linking of Key West with New York via the East Florida Railway was a major feat of U.S. civil engineering. Between 1905 and 1909, they reported as well on what was considered a marvel of human engineering, the drainage of the Everglades. This news was punctuated by news of the “greatest of human achievements,” 1906’s progress toward completion of the Panama Canal.
The local news reported the everyday lives of Floridians, for example: meetings of the Melrose Women’s Society, openings of new offices and the development and expansion of banks, new schools and the expansion of higher education. Perhaps most important to the people of Florida, the news preserved genealogical information.
Florida newspapers, of course, carried all of the major news of the nation and the world. With articles copied from the newspapers of Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, as well as London, tourists could keep up with the cold, hard facts of life at home while enjoying warm breezes on Florida’s sunny shores.
Florida’s Newspaper Collections
The P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida holds the largest collection of newspapers in the state and Florida’s only collection of newspapers on preservation microfilm. Collection and preservation efforts begun in 1944 called for acquisition of at least one newspaper from each of Florida’s 67 counties on an ongoing basis. The library began to produce in-house microfilm copies of its Florida newspapers in 1947 and films 64 current Florida newspapers on a regular basis today.
