Texas Digital Newspaper Program

DataWhat we gather, and how we use it.

ByAna Krahmer

& Mark Phillips

University of North Texas Libraries

4 February 2014Start Spreading the News!

OverviewI. Target AudiencesII. Data CollectionIII. Data UseIV. Questions

Target AudiencesOf the Texas Digital Newspaper Program

Target Audiences• K-12 Students & Educators• Higher Education Researchers, including undergraduate, graduate,

and faculty researchers• Librarians• Genealogists• Lay-Historians• Lifelong-Learners

Current Classroom Use• Teaching with Primary Sources: National History Day;

Texas Junior Historians; Texas History, grades 4 & 7.• Texas Tech University, Dr. Ann Hawkins’ Texas Manuscript

Cultures Online, undergraduate and graduate Book History and Research Methods courses.

• University of North Texas, Dr. Andrew Torget’s courses, History of Texas and American History courses.

• Austin College, Dr. Light Cummins’ Research Methods.

Library Use• Texas Digital Newspaper Program Feedback utility• Partner institution pages• Newspaper Program Traveling Banner• Links to share on social networking feeds

Genealogists• Full-text searchability• Search content highlighting• Full metadata records• Faceted links

Lay-Historians• Annual Digital Frontiers Conference• Free and open access to newspaper content• Zoomable views• Permissions to use in research, with citations

Lifelong-Learners• Emeritus College students• Partner public library patrons• Local civic interest groups

Data CollectionWhere did it all come from?

Data Collection• Qualitative: Surveys, Feedback responses, grant report comments,

partner communications• Quantitative: Analysis of collection usage, geographic origin,

contributing partners, annual additions to collection

Data Collection (Qualitative)• Grant-funded projects require final reports from TDNP partner

institutions. • In 2012, Kathleen Murray and Dreanna Belden launched an impact

survey for Portal to Texas History users.• The Portal feedback database offers years of user questions.

Data Collection (Qualitative)“The newspaper digitization project places our library in position to reach out toward the future. By taking a piece of the past and bringing it with us, we are sure to grow and learn, appreciate and respect what was, what is and what will be.” -Whitaker, L. (2013). Richard S. & Leah Morris Memorial Library Final Grant Project Report to the Tocker Foundation.

Data Collection (Qualitative)• The Portal to Texas History Impact Survey was launched in 2012 by

Murray and Belden.• Of 573 respondents, 36% self-identified as genealogists, 19% as lifelong-learners, 19% as historians, 6% as librarians,  5% as students, and 15% as “other.” 

• 93 individual comments within this survey cited the newspapers as being of especial value.

Data Collection (Quantitative)• Descriptive metadata for the Texas Digital Newspaper Program collection

is available via OAI-PMH in multiple formats.• Utilized a Python-based harvester, pyoaiharvester, to collect metadata

from the TDNP OAI Repository endpoint.• All years combined total 165,298 metadata records.• Phillips then prepared a Python script to parse records and extract

relevant information. • This script uses the output of the pyoaiharvester tool as input, to return a

tab-delimited file displaying one newspaper issue per row.

Field Field Description Example DataARK ARK Identifier for issue ark:/67531/metapth16320

Partner Contributing Partner Code BDPL

Year Online Year issue went online (prefixed with “od:”)

od:2006

Year Year of newspaper issue 1934

Decade Decade of newspaper issue 1930

County County of newspaper issue Palo Pinto County

Community Community of newspaper issue Mineral Wells

Title Title of newspaper issue The Tattler

*All values in the Partner field can be resolved from the controlled vocabulary: http://digital2.library.unt.edu/vocabularies/institutions/

The fields* in the tab-delimited file are:

Year # of Issues Cumulative % of Issues Cummulative %

2006 54 54 0.03% 0.03%

2007 0 0 0% 0.03%

2008 44 98 0.03% 0.06%

2009 7,263 7,361 4.40% 4.46%

2010 44,788 52,149 27.10% 31.56%

2011 32,626 84,775 19.74% 51.30%

2012 30,836 115,611 18.65% 69.95%

2013 49,538 165,149 29.97% 99.92%

Number of issues added per year (n=165,149)

Year # of Titles Added

# of New Titles Added

Cummulative # of Titles

2006 2 2 2

2007 0 0 2

2008 2 2 4

2009 26 25 29

2010 121 114 143

2011 269 252 395

2012 163 145 540

2013 98 79 619

Number of counties added per year (n=109)

Year # of Communities Added # of New Communities Added

Cummulative # of Communities

2006 2 2 2

2007 0 0 2

2008 2 2 4

2009 17 16 20

2010 35 22 42

2011 62 42 84

2012 66 37 121

2013 47 21 142

Number of communities added per year (n=142)

Counties currently represented in the TDNP Collection

Year # of Partners Added # of New Partners Added

Cummulative # of Partners

2006 2 2 2

2007 0 0 2

2008 2 2 4

2009 6 5 9

2010 10 6 15

2011 16 12 27

2012 20 10 37

2013 24 10 47

2014 3 1 48

Number of partners added per year (n=48)

Partner Type # of Partners by Type # of Issues

Public Libraries 27 66,320

Academic Libraries & Archives*

13 41,308

Genealogical/Historical Societies

4 5,065

Museums 2 2,544

* “UNT Archives” and “UNT Libraries” are two partner institutions, thus actually totaling to 48 partners. This table indicates content whose digitization was funded by external partners. Content funded internally by UNT totals to 49,805 and has been removed from this table.  

TDNP Partner Institutions

Google Fusion Tables map, derived from TDNP Newspaper Locations: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?q=select+col1+from+17utAXOiLgXhaEXlHgsIfE2DJ_2OlQyD-XIR-LZU&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=28.271046172964198&lng=-103.64894140625&t=1&z=6&l=col1&y=2&tmplt=2&hml=GEOCODABLE

External References

• Python Metadata Extraction Script: https://github.com/vphill/untl_metadata_extraction/blob/master/tdnp_dataset.py

• Texas Digital Newspaper Program OAI API: http://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/TDNP/oai/

• PYOAIHarvester Script: https://github.com/vphill/pyoaiharvester • Belden, Dreanna & Murray, Kathleen R. Where do users find value?. UNT Digital

Library. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc185793/. Accessed January 27, 2014.

Questions?Ana KrahmerAna.Krahmer@unt.edu

Mark PhillipsMark.Phillips@unt.edu