Tennessee joined the United States Newspaper Program (USNP) in 1994 when the University of Tennessee Libraries was awarded a one year planning grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The purpose that year was to establish the groundwork for the project and determine the general outline for implementation. To accomplish that we needed information about newspaper holdings in Tennessee so we conducted a statewide survey of almost 900 possible newspaper repositories. Using the information from the survey and input from advisors, we submitted a grant proposal for the first part of the implementation project. The proposal was successful and we were awarded a twenty-two month, approximately $250,000 grant for the period of July, 1995 - April, 1997 and a subsequent one year extension. In May, 1998 we were awarded a two year continuation grant which will take us through April, 2000.

The general goals of the TNP, like all USNP projects, are to locate, catalog, and preserve American newspapers from the earliest colonial times to the present, thereby helping to ensure that America's historical newspapers will be available for current and future generations. All fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands are currently involved in or have completed a USNP project. Each state project is responsible for cataloging all American newspapers held in its state and preserving, by microfilming, selected newspapers published within the state (though issues are commonly borrowed from repositories in other states to fill in gaps). The projects are supported with financial, administrative, and technical assistance from the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Library of Congress in addition to cost sharing by the host institutions.

The projects are generally organized in three phases: initial planning and survey, cataloging and inventory, and preservation microfilming, with each phase sometimes taking a couple of grants to complete. Although the phases often overlap to some extent, it is often better that the inventory and cataloging phase of the project precede the preservation phase so that gaps in newspaper runs at one institution can be filled in with holdings from other institutions sometimes only discovered during cataloging site visits; this helps to ensure that titles are as complete as possible before microfilming.

We began our cataloging and inventory phase at the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, which holds the largest collection of Tennessee newspapers, and at the University of Tennessee Libraries in Knoxville, the home base for the project and the repository of the largest number of American newspapers in the state. Much of the work is now complete at those two sites but as we continue to finish things up there we are sending staff out to other sites. We have begun working through the newspaper collection in the McClung Historical Collection, a branch of the Knox County Public Library in Knoxville. When we finish the cataloging at those sites, we will continue the fieldwork portion of the project during which catalogers will travel to the many other newspaper repositories in the state to catalog and inventory their newspaper holdings.

The bibliographic and holdings records we are creating or updating are part of OCLC's database that is available at libraries and other institutions around the world. This information, in combination with interlibrary loan ability of the microfilm, greatly improves access to Tennessee's newspaper holdings and to the history of the people and places recorded in them. Information from the survey data is kept in a local database at the project office and is used in planning and carrying out the project and in assisting researchers to locate newspapers before the information becomes available through OCLC. Much of the information we collected is available on our database available on the Web.

We have made a big dent but still have a long way to go in the cataloging and inventory of the estimated 8000 unique American newspaper titles held in Tennessee. The level of funding of future grants will determine, in part, how quickly we get to various areas of the state and how many Tennessee titles will be preserved on microfilm; many of the newspaper projects in other states will be finishing up within the next year or two which will hopefully allow for stepped up progress through an increase in funding for the remaining projects such as the TNP.

As of May 1997, 28 states have completed their participation in the USNP. It is projected that of the 22 current projects, 13 will be complete within two years and the remaining nine will finish on or before 2006. By the end of the program it is estimated that about 130,000 unique newspaper titles will have been cataloged and about 55 million pages of newspaper preserved on microfilm. Approximately $33 million will have come from NEH funds and about $14 million from cost sharing.

For more information about the project feel free to contact us at the address below. If you are a member of a Tennessee organization that has American newspapers and missed our survey or have acquired additional newspapers since returning the survey (other than current issues being added to a title already reported) please let us know.

TELEPHONE: (865) 974-6913
FAX: (865) 974-0551
EMAIL: tnp@utk.edu