Welcome to the Oregon Digital Newspaper ProgramPosted on July 22, 2025May 14, 2026 by Elizabeth This is the blog site for the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program, a service of the University of Oregon Libraries. This website provides information about ODNP, including history, policies, and guidelines for newspaper digitization. This website also provides news and updates about the program and digitization projects. To access digitized newspapers, please go to Historic Oregon Newspapers.
Bots vs. Humans: The Scramble for Security in an Open Access DatabasePosted on September 4, 2026September 4, 2026 by Elizabeth Some Historic Oregon Newspapers users have reported being stuck on the “verify you are a human” page while starting their searches on the website. This is very frustrating. This post aims to explain what is happening and how researchers can work around it. The Historic Oregon Newspapers website has been bombarded with bot traffic over the last year. In 2025-2026, the website had 44 million site visits. Compare that to 2024 when we had five million, or 2023 when we had just over two million. This exponential growth cannot be attributed solely to the fact that we have more extensive content than ever before, or that more genealogists and local history buffs are discovering the website. We are proud to be a free, open access digital collection, but that openness means the website is vulnerable to malicious bots that bombard the site with multiple requests that can cause the website to slow down or to shut down entirely. This problem is not unique to Historic Oregon Newspapers. Bot traffic has increased everywhere on the Internet, particularly as AI companies inhale any available digital content to feed the corpus. Keeping the website both open and protected is an ongoing challenge for the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program’s programmer, Jeremy Echols. He recently deployed a new, more robust version of Cloudflare’s Turnstile system that asks a user’s computer to confirm the user is verified or a human user before proceeding with a search. This is the page where malicious bots are stopped, and it is also where some bona fide users are getting stuck. Using a different browser or reconfiguring privacy controls for the Historic Oregon Newspapers website may solve the problem. If not, please contact us so we can help troubleshoot. Jeremy reported that on the morning of August 21, “the website had over 1.5 million bot requests in four hours, but the new security measures meant that the system had only minor problems keeping up. There were two one-minute outages (which recovered on their own), a few cases where complex searches took 30 seconds to respond, and in general the site has been a little slower than I would like (occasional 5+ second delays on the faster pages). But overall, availability has been significantly better than on the previous floods, and todayâs traffic is a lot more intense than what we saw earlier this week.” This will be an ongoing problem that requires consistent monitoring and adjustments as bots become more sophisticated at penetrating security checks to scrape our content. We appreciate your patience while we continue to work on this. Please do reach out if we can help improve your access to the website.
Access to the Eugene Register-GuardPosted on July 20, 2026July 20, 2026 by Elizabeth A frequently asked question is “How can I get access to the Eugene Register-Guard?” This is the paper of record for the city of Eugene and it is a critical source for anyone doing research about this area. Unfortunately, the answer is not as straightforward as one would hope. This post will list the various ways to access this newspaper along with some explanation about why. First, I took a look at the Archives link on the Register-Guardâs own website: https://user.registerguard.com/user/newspaper-archives/. This link goes to a Newspapers.com portal specific to the RG and covers 1867-2026. I can search the database although I canât open pages without a subscription to the RG. This limited access could still be useful as an index to find relevant articles, and then you would have to access the full articles elsewhere. The UO Libraries provides access to past and current issues of the Register-Guard (and its previous titles) through several different ways. Basically, we have online access to this newspaper from ~1876-present, but there is no index or keyword search option for the years 1984-2000 beyond the RG Archives/Newspapers.com option. Historic Oregon Newspapers (through 1963) Keyword searchable Free! Microfilm in UO Libraries (through 2014) Open to the public for use in Knight Library No keyword search Google News Archive (through 2008) No keyword search option Some missing issues Free! Newspapers.com (Oregon newspapers only) (through 1983) Keyword searchable UO Libraries has a subscription The public can access this database on computers in Knight Library Access World News (2001-current) Keyword searchable UO Libraries has a subscription The public can access this database on computers in Knight Library Historic Oregon Newspapers will only be able to provide access to RG issues through 1963 due to copyright. We do not have permission from the current publisher to digitize and host content beyond that date. The way that dates display in Historic Oregon Newspapers can be confusing. On the page with the list of titles, reading left to right, the first date you see is the timespan the title was in publication (underlined below in red). The dates on the right side of the screen are the dates of issues we provide access to on the website (1930-1963). The dates of the publication and the issues we provide sometimes line up but not always, as in the case of the Register-Guard; it published under that name until 1983 but our coverage only goes through 1963. I have noticed that the UO Librariesâ subscription to Newspapers.com (Oregon newspapers only) has started to include RG issues up into the 1980s. I have assumed they are working with the Register-Guard itself to digitize that content since Newspapers.com did not request the negative master microfilm from our collections as the source for digitization as they have in the past. Hopefully this means that more of the RG will continue to appear in that database, especially if they can fill that critical gap in coverage from 1984-2000. Although with the new RG-only portal through Newspapers.com they may not add any more content to the other version we have access to. I will be keeping an eye on it because it is so important for local researchers.
National Summit on Local News Preservation conference reportPosted on June 25, 2026June 25, 2026 by Elizabeth The National Summit on Local News Preservation took place on June 17, 2026, in National Harbor, Maryland. The conference was sponsored by the Internet Archive, Poynter Institute, and the Investigative Journalists and Editors association. The goal of the event was to bring together journalists, producers, librarians, and archivists âto develop collaborative, scalable solutions to address the urgent preservation challenges presented by the rapidly changing local news landscape.â I attended in my role as program manager for the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program to learn about what other organizations are doing to preserve current news. Preserving born-digital current news is a central part of ODNPâs mission, but it has many challenges that are exacerbated by todayâs local news environment. The morning featured two panel presentations that framed the issues and presented some opportunities and strategies for addressing them. The afternoon included a block of lightning presentations about different projects to preserve local news, and then breakout discussions amongst the participants followed by representatives of each group sharing their groupâs ideas. These discussions were structured around different sub-themes for each group to address: Access and Discovery; Infrastructure and Technology; Rights, Revenue, and the Public Good; Sustainability and Advocacy. I was assigned to Organizational Culture and Partnerships. We discussed these questions: How do we move from emergency rescue to an active culture of preservation? How can we embed preservation into the workflow of local newsrooms? What does a successful relationship between a local library/archive and newsroom look like? While itâs always great and energizing to be in the same room with folks who work within oneâs same narrow niche and who are concerned with the same things, my main takeaway is this: Local news and its preservation and access are a form of civic infrastructure. Local news is a public good that records local events, politics, and cultural life which then becomes local history. At its best it documents local government and holds it accountable to citizens. However, news organizations are usually for-profit businesses, and today they are operating on thinner and thinner margins, and many hold on to their back issues with the hope of monetizing them. One of the panelists put it well: âWhen a business is financially distressed everything looks like an assetâ (Frank LoMonte). I and many other conference participants wished for a boilerplate statement we could use with publishers to persuade them to share their content with libraries and archives for preservation. How do we make a publisher care about tomorrowâs history when they are trying to turn a profit today? Also, how can we make as easy as possible for publishers to participate in preservation? Going forward I hope to make better connections with news organizations in Oregon, to hear their concerns so we can work together in a mutually beneficial way. (This also could serve my goal to visit every Oregon county, Ã la Elizabeth Findly). I also want to investigate the possibility of the Internet Archiveâs Community Webs program for capturing and preserving Oregon news websites that donât align well with our current technical requirements. Iâd love to have all Oregon news available through our own Historic Oregon Newspapers, but perhaps a distributed network of preservation is more feasible. Along those lines, I also learned about the Library of Congress web archiving program for local news websites, the United States News Web Archive. They crawl a short list of news sites without paywalls from each state and make the web archives available in the LOC reading room, thus circumventing any rights issues. Lastly, Iâll be treating myself to enhancing current lists and making new ones to keep track of where all the digital newspapers and programs exist. –Elizabeth Peterson, ODNP program manager
The ODNP Digitization QueuePosted on May 22, 2026May 22, 2026 by Elizabeth As the program manager for the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP), I’m frequently asked what newspaper titles we’re currently working on. I post periodic updates about the digitization queue on this blog, but I thought it would be useful to have one page that provides a real-time list of all of the projects that we have underway and that are in the pipeline. I will update this page as we complete projects and add new ones. Some projects on the list are far out into the future, so I have indicated the fiscal year when we will start work, e.g., FY27 means the year that runs July 1, 2026-June 30, 2027. Interested in digitizing newspapers? Check out our overview of how it works, or contact us. _______________________________________________________________ Projects Underway Batch 114: Sandy Post (1949-1952; 1967-1968; 1982-1986) microfilm digitization and digital photography project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 115: Sandy Post (1986-1992; Apr 1989-1992) microfilm digitization project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 123: Cottage Grove Sentinel (1956-1967) microfilm digitization project sponsor: Cottage Grove Partners in History Batch 125: Newberg Graphic (1922-1929) microfilm digitization project sponsor: Newberg Library Batch 126: What’s Happening (1982-1993) and Eugene Weekly (1993-2003) microfilm digitization project sponsor: Ducks Give fundraising Batch 128: Coos Bay News (1873-1879) and The Rustic (1871-1872) microfilm digitization project sponsor: Bert Dunn and Mary Barton Batch 129: Early Eugene newspapers; FY26 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Bert Dunn and Mike Logan Eugene City Guard (2 reels; 1867-1876) The People’s Press (1 partial reel; 1859-1860) Democratic Herald (1 partial reel; 1860-1861) Oregon State Journal (2 reels; 1864-1868) Batch 131: Street Roots and Burnside Cadillac (1995-2008); FY26 digital photography project sponsor: anonymous donor Batch 132: Eagle Point Independent and Upper Rogue Independent (1975-1999); FY26 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Eagle Point Friends of the Library National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) Grant Project microfilm digitization and digital photography project sponsor: National Endowment for the Humanities — 100,00 pages; 1855-1961 Portland. American Hebrew News Portland. Labor Newdealer and CIO Industrial Worker Portland. Pacific Christian Advocate Portland. Jewish Tribune Astoria. Toveri Portland. Oregon Labor Press Portland. International Woodworker Portland. The Portland Observer/The People’s Observer/The Observer Portland. Portland Challenger Portland. Oregon Mirror Portland. Oregon Staats Zeitung Portland. Deutsche Zeitung Portland. Oregon Deutsche Zeitung Portland. Nachrichten Aus Dem Nordwesten Und Freie Presse Fossil. Fossil Journal Arlington. Arlington Bulletin Grass Valley. Grass Valley Journal Newport. Newport Journal Mitchell. Wheeler County Chronicle Lakeview. Lake County Examiner Projects in the Digitization Queue Batch 116: Sandy Post (1993-1999); FY27 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 117: Sandy Post (2000-2002); FY28 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 120: Sandy Post (2003-2007); FY29 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 121: Sandy Post (2007-2011); FY30 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 122: Sandy Post (2012-2014); FY31 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Friends of the Sandy Public Library Batch 124: Cottage Grove Sentinel (1967-1973); FY27 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Cottage Grove Partners in History Batch 127: Hood River News and Columbia Gorge News (14 issues; 2020-2021), FY26 digital photography project sponsor: UO Libraries Batch 130: The Monroe Tribune (1936-1940); FY26 digital photography project sponsor: South Benton Communities Historical Association Museum Batch 133: Columbia County Chronicle & Chief (2015-2024); FY26 digital photography project sponsor: St. Helens Public Library and Columbia County Museum Association Batch 134: Junction City Times (1891-1909); FY26 microfilm digitization project sponsor: individual private donor Batch 135: Ashland Daily Tidings (1928-1929); FY26 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Ashland.News, Jackson County Cultural Coalition Batch 136: Grants Pass Daily Courier (1924-1926); FY26  microfilm digitization project sponsor: Josephine County Historical Society Batch 137: Rose City Herald (1928-1932); FY26 digital photography project sponsor: individual private donor Batch 138: Dayton Tribune (1929-1947); FY26 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Dayton Community Development Association Batch 140: Clatskanie Chief (1891-1923); FY27 digital photography project sponsor: Clatskanie Historical Society Batch 141: UO Publications (19 titles); FY26-27 digital photography project sponsor: UO Libraries Batch 142: Drain newspapers; FY27 microfilm digitization project sponsor: The Witt Family, Drain, OR Drain Watchman (1900-1901) Drain NonPareil (1901-1912) The Drain Echo (1885-1888) North Douglas Herald (1912-1916) Batch 143: Florence newspapers; FY27 microfilm digitization project sponsor: Siuslaw Pioneer Museum The West (1902-1921) Siuslaw News (1924-1925) Florence Times (1925-1926) Recently Completed Projects Oregon Tribal Publications Project microfilm digitization and digital photography project sponsor: State Library of Oregon and UO Libraries — The Chemawa American (1912-1986) — Weekly Chemawa American (1901-1912) — Siletz News Letter (1990-1997) — Siletz News (1998-2025) — Siletz News (1983-1989) — Siletz News II (1989-1993) — Siletz Tribal Newspaper (1997) — Spilyay Tymoo (1976-2005) — The Chief (Chemawa Indian School yearbook) – forthcoming — Warm Springs Reservation Tomahawk (1950s) — The Tomahawk II (1992-1996) – forthcoming Batch 139: UO Publications (4 titles); FY26 digital photography project sponsor: UO Libraries Oregon Weekly (1900-1909) microfilm digitization project sponsor: UO Libraries Check out the posts about our New Content.
New Content from Willamina, Coquille, EugenePosted on May 22, 2026May 22, 2026 by Elizabeth The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program recently completed several digitization projects that provide expanded coverage as well as content from new towns not previously represented in Historic Oregon Newspapers. Willamina The City of Willamina and the Museum of Local History were awarded an Oregon Museum Grant through Oregon Parks and Recreation to digitize about 8,400 pages of newspapers from Willamina, including about 400 pages of original newsprint only available from the museum. The Willamina Times (1909-1972) The Times of Willamina (1972-1974) The Willamina Times (1974) The Times of Willamina-Sheridan (1974) The Willamina Times II (1995) Coquille Bert Dunn and Mary Barton, two longtime supporters of newspaper digitization, sponsored this project to digitize ten more years (9,188 pages) of the Coquille Valley Sentinel Coquille Valley Sentinel (1946-1956) Eugene Thanks to a successful fundraising effort for this beloved alternative news weekly, digitization of the full run of Eugene Weekly and its predecessor title What’s Happening is underway. The first five years of What’s Happening is now available online in Historic Oregon Newspapers. ODNP also got permission to ingest digital copies of Eugene Weekly covering 2003-current, and these are also now available. What’s Happening (1982-1987) Eugene Weekly (2003-2025) _____________________________________________ Interested in digitizing newspapers? Check out our overview of how it works, or contact us.
Historic Oregon Newspapers Tops 3 Million PagesPosted on May 14, 2026May 14, 2026 by Elizabeth The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program reached an exciting milestone today:Â Historic Oregon Newspapers now has over three million pages! The recent jump in our numbers is thanks to the heroic work of ODNP Project Manager Justin Spence, with critical assistance from programmer Jeremy Echols, to remediate and ingest a backlog of data from a 2015 digitization project with Newspapers.com. This project included large runs of titles from several cities, including Medford, Salem, Albany, Bend, Corvallis, Roseburg, Klamath Falls, La Grande, and Eugene. Work is ongoing on this project so we can expect to see some more dramatic increases in our content this year.
Now Available: SEIU Local 503 Historical PublicationsPosted on April 3, 2026April 3, 2026 by Elizabeth The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program recently completed a digitization project of twelve different publications published by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 503, which represents employees of state, local government and non-profit agencies and care facilities. SEIU Local 503 staff loaned us a box of historical newsletters, reports, voter guides, and other materials, some going back to the 1940s. They provide a fascinating glimpse into the history of public employee unions in Oregon. These publications are also a great example of the variety of periodicals available in Historic Oregon Newspapers. Unlike a community newspaper which provides general news and information to a city or town, the SEIU Local 503 publications are published for a specific audience with news and information tailored to the interests of members of the union. The project included the following titles. Links take you directly to issues in Historic Oregon Newspapers. The Oregon State Employee The OSEA Sentinel The Oregon State Employee News The OSEA News The Oregon Public Employe The 503 Voice Legislative Accountability Report Bringing Dignity Home Dignity Statewide Office Elections, Candidate Statements Working Families Voters’ Guide Homecare Worker Orientation These materials add to our growing content related to labor movements in Oregon, including Toveri, Toveritar, Oregon Labor Press, and Portland Labor Press. _____________________________________________ Interested in digitizing newspapers? Check out our overview of how it works, or contact us.
Young Cartoonist’s Work Featured in Sandy PostPosted on January 29, 2026January 29, 2026 by Elizabeth An unexpected gem turned up during a recent import of new issues from the Sandy Post: a comic strip called “Bobcats” written and drawn by 10-year-old Adam Kraft of Sandy, Oregon. His first strip appeared on Nov. 21, 1985. The strips appeared in the newspaper at least until July 31, 1986 (the latest issue we have digitized from this title). A selection of his strips is below. You can find more by searching “adam kraft” in Historic Oregon Newspapers. His jokes are at least as good as the ones in many of the syndicated comic strips that appeared in newspapers at that time, and his artwork skillfully contributes to the comedic storytelling. It’s interesting to see that the editors at the Sandy Post would have allowed a fifth grader be a regular contributor this way. This is one fun example of the specialized content that can be found in local newspapers.
Now Available: Two New Titles From VernoniaPosted on January 12, 2026January 29, 2026 by Elizabeth Thanks to the folks at the Vernonia Public Library, we now have two new titles from Vernonia available online in Historic Oregon Newspapers: Vernonia News Weekly (1976-1978) Vernonia Freedom (1978-1981) Vernonia, a small community in Columbia County, is well-represented in Historic Oregon Newspapers, with five different newspaper titles covering 1922-2021, and 42,280 pages available for research. You can search across all of these titles simultaneously by going to Historic Oregon Newspapers > Advanced Search > Limit By > City > Vernonia. _____________________________________________ Interested in digitizing newspapers? Check out our overview of how it works, or contact us.
Now Available: Sherman CountyPosted on October 31, 2025October 31, 2025 by Elizabeth Until recently, Historic Oregon Newspapers had at least one newspaper from every one of Oregon’s 36 counties — except for Sherman County. But now, thanks to the fundraising efforts of our partner Sherman County Historical Museum, several newspapers from this area of north-central Oregon are now available. In October 2025 we added over 15,000 pages from the following titles: Sherman County Observer (1897-1931) Sherman County Journal (1931-1963) Moro Observer (1896-1897) Moro Leader (1898-1900) Moro Bulletin (1902) The People’s Republic (1898-1899) The Wasco News (1897-1908) You can search across all of these titles simultaneously by going to Historic Oregon Newspapers > Advanced Search > Limit By > County > Sherman. _____________________________________________ Interested in digitizing newspapers? Check out our overview of how it works, or contact us.
