Coronado Library seeks solution as funding cuts threaten local news archival project

Coronado Public Library has long promoted access to a newspaper archive tracking over a century of the city’s history. 

But with the archive no longer being updated, the public’s access to local news historical records are in jeopardy. The UC Riverside program that houses and runs the California Digital Newspaper Collection lost its state funding, which was tied to a federal grant, leading to layoffs in the program that limited the service.

Now library leaders are looking for other funding sources to bring the archival work in house. While they’ve identified a trust fund that could support the project in the short term, an ongoing solution isn’t yet clear. 

And there’s a time crunch. Coronado Library Director Shaun Briley said there’s already a backlog of documents, but the uploading pause could add to the pileup.

“We don’t want to get such a huge backlog of undigitized material that becomes an unwieldy class,” Briley said. 

Earlier this month at a Library Board of Trustees meeting, library leaders discussed using a trust fund limited to projects related to U.S. history, as a stopgap to fund the archival efforts. The trust fund has about $675,000 available, enough, library leaders say, to use in the short-term considering a previous digitization project only cost around $50,000.

Library staff are also considering other grants, possible software solutions and a partnership with the Coronado Historical Association to help solve the problem. Trustees will meet later to decide on what next steps to take.

For some years, the library has digitized microfilm of local Coronado newspapers dating back to the 1880s and adding them to the collection managed by UC Riverside. Since then, with permission from local papers, the Coronado Library has digitized and organized local news content to send to UC Riverside.

The university maintains a database of nearly a million California newspaper issues published from 1846 to the present. The archive includes search capabilities that make it easy to use.

Aside from preservation, Briley said library leaders want to make sure the historical record remains accessible.

Protecting the archive is a “non-partisan issue,” he told library trustees at the meeting this month. “The preservation of your local newspapers, your local historical record, is really important,” he said.

UC Riverside lost state and federal funding to run the archive program, including support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Briley and the Coronado City Council sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom in May, asking that he return funding to the program. The letter explains how the California Digital Newspaper Collection “is a vital statewide resource,” and highlights the importance of the tool for “education, journalism, genealogy, civic research, and the preservation of California’s rich cultural heritage.”

Funds were returned after a federal judge ruled in favor of humanities organizations that sued the federal government. The California state budget, which went into effect July 1, included full funding for the collection, and the money is available to UC Riverside, according to a spokesperson for the California State Library. 

A spokesperson for UC Riverside’s dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Darrell Williams declined to provide inewsource with a comment. 

In a July message on the digital collection website, an update signed by Williams reads in part, “We are grateful that most of the state and federal funding was restored at the start of the current fiscal year. … We nonetheless recognize that the restored funding will not adequately cover the rising costs of personnel, technology, and cybersecurity.”

The statement says the university is working to find a way for the collection to continue to be available, including through identifying new platforms and partnerships.