History buffs now have a few more items to digest at the Internet smorgasbord — and they're packed with local flavor.
The University of Utah Marriott Library's Utah Digital Newspapers program has added the early years of both the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune to the digital, searchable newspaper offerings at its Web site, www.digitalnewspapers.org.
The program, which began in 2002 by putting rural weekly newspapers' past editions online, has added the Deseret News editions from its first on June 15, 1850, through February 1871 — when the paper was a weekly — and hopes by month's end to have the remainder through 1898 added. Work to put the daily Tribune — originally the Salt Lake Daily Tribune and Utah Mining Gazette — from its initial edition on April 15, 1871, through the remainder of that century is virtually completed.
"When we first started, we did rural weeklies, but everybody was still clamoring for the Deseret News and Tribune," said John Herbert, director of the Utah Digital Newspapers program. "I kind of had to put them off by saying, 'Just be patient. We're going to get there.' We actually found a bucket of money through one of our federal grants to go do the Trib and Deseret News, and that's what we've done.
"We get a real sense of excitement about finally getting to two of the oldest newspapers — the Deseret News is the oldest — and the fact both are still operating really helps. They are rivals, and that really helps. Plus, we're going back to Volume 1, No. 1. It's a treasure trove, there's no question about it, of all kinds of information, and I think our Web site usage is reflective of that."
In the 2005 second quarter, Web site visits totaled about 55,000, and Herbert said visit figures have grown almost every quarter for the past three years. He's unsure how much they will increase with the addition of the early Salt Lake dailies.
The program's digitized collection now has about 50 titles from 27 of the state's 29 counties, and nearly 450,000 pages. They're accessible for free.
The Marriott library has been working with Brigham Young University on the Deseret News project in particular. The owner of its own set of original papers, BYU has used its equipment for the scanning, and a third-party vendor provided optical character recognition work.
The Deseret News collection eventually will reside on the BYU servers, perhaps by year-end, but still will be searchable from the UDN Web site.
Various grants and donations have provided more than $2 million to fund the digitizing work so far. Herbert figures it likely is the biggest public-sector collection of its type in the country. If more funds become available, more will be added to the collection.
"By far, the one thing our users tell us we can do to improve our Web site is add content," Herbert said. "People are dying for more."
Among Herbert's favorites is the Jan. 1, 1897, edition of the Trib. Its front page contains a drawing containing historic elements of Utah's "Fifty Years of Progress."
"It's a 32-page issue that has histories of the different industries and areas of the state," Herbert said. "It's fascinating. The front page is kind of a collector's item in itself."
E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com