CHICAGO (May 24, 2006) - David Spadafora, president and librarian of the Newberry Library, announced today that the Library has received a $297,000 grant from National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Preservation and Access for a two-year project titled, "Headlines from the Heartland: Preserving and Enhancing Access to Manuscript Collections Regarding Newspaper Journalism in Chicago."
This generous support will allow the library to arrange and preserve 39 of its most compelling and underused Midwest manuscript collections, and to provide detailed, Web-based finding aids for them. Many of the collections relate to the legendary Chicago Daily News. Among others, the collections include the newspaper's corporate archives, and the papers of publishers Victor Lawson and Melville Stone, foreign correspondents Edward Price Bell and Paul Scott Mowrer, editors Henry Justin Smith and Charles H. Dennis, and columnists Mike Royko and Howard Vincent O'Brien.
"More than 130 years of Chicago history and culture, and national and international events, are documented in these unique and valuable collections," Spadafora said. "This grant will help us improve access and open the doors to another generation of readers.
"The Newberry is proud to have in its care items that are such an important part of Chicago's history," he added.
In addition to the Chicago Daily News, the Newberry Library's journalism collection includes records from the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Reader, and the papers of journalists who worked for these newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, and others. A sampling of other journalism-related collections can be found on the Newberry's Web site at www.newberry.org/collections/journalism.html .
About the Newberry Library
The Newberry Library is an independent library open to the public for research and reference in the humanities. One of the largest independent research libraries in the United States, the Newberry holds an extraordinary collection of about 1.5 million books, 5 million manuscript pages, and more than 300,000 historic maps. As one of the world's leading repositories of a broad range of books and manuscripts relating to the civilizations of western Europe and the Americas, the Library acquires and preserves research collections of such materials and provides for and promotes their effective use by a diverse community of users.