Prometheus 6

Quote of note:

Many of the newspapers that we represent go back well over 100 years,  Channing said.  Most, if not all of them, were founded not for business reasons, but for social and political reasons. Because of that, for the most part, they are undercapitalized. Many of them have no means of preserving their archives. Some of them have put [the back issues] on microfilm, but unfortunately some of them are just rotting away in back rooms because the paper can't afford to do anything to preserve them. 

Channing said that the combination of all these papers represents an enormous historical pool of information that is not available anywhere else. Throughout history, the papers have covered events and issues from the viewpoint of the African American community in a way that mainstream papers haven't.

...The final, fully Internet-searchable information database will be made available to each individual paper. The hope is eventually to create a master, Internet-enabled portal database. Anyone from the merely curious to historical scholars will be able to take a tour through history from the perspective of the black newspaper.  

Companies launch historic collaboration to digitize black newspapers, create portal
By Hays Goodman

The raging tornado that clawed its way up the banks of the muddy Mississippi river on May 7, 1840, couldn't have hit at a worse possible time. River traffic was high on a Friday afternoon and the massive storm was wide enough to deal death on both sides of the water. The  official  death toll is listed at 137 to this day, but it's extremely doubtful that even one African American death was noted in the tally for the day's newspapers.

Even 50 to 80 years later, in many parts of the country, white newspaper owners did not record the deaths of African Americans.

So-called "black newspapers" have since grown up over the years to become powerful record keepers of a segment of society sometimes relegated to the sidelines by the mainstream media.

Many of these are small community newspapers, with few advanced IT resources, and very little emphasis placed on the value of their store of historical data.

That's about to change. A partnership between leading black media placement firm Amalgamated Publishers Inc. and Ninestars Information Technology Ltd. has been created to embark on the process of digitizing reams of back-issues from more than 200 black newspapers throughout the United States.