Editorial: CA digital newspaper archive in peril

We all know the state of the newspaper industry has been dire for years. But thanks to the California Digital Newspaper Archive housed at UC Riverside, the printed page lives on virtually for researchers, genealogists, journalists, and others who rely on the unique history of publications of all kinds, some dating back 200 years, that are accessible with a few clicks. The Bay Area Reporter’s digitized archives are housed there (and also at the Internet Archive), where people can peruse the paper’s historic record of the LGBTQ community.

Now, the CDNA collection is in peril, as the UC Riverside Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, which houses the archive, is over $300,000 in debt.

Brian Geiger, director of the center, sent out an urgent plea last week, stating that the archive’s funding from the California State Library has been withheld for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. “If we don’t raise at least $300,000 by June 30, the end of the fiscal year, we will almost certainly have to cease operations,” Geiger wrote.

“The annual appropriation from the state is $430,000,” funds administered by the California State Library, Geiger told the J, a Jewish publication that unveiled its digital archives housed on the site in 2022. “We didn’t receive any of it this fiscal year, which runs from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. UCR has continued to pay expenses, mainly salaries, this entire year,” expecting to be reimbursed by the state.

Geiger stated that he has some funds in reserve, hence the $300,000 fundraising figure. But with time running out, the situation is critical.

The UC Riverside digital newspaper archive, and others like it, is important because it would cost each publication so much money to create their own digital archives. Not to mention the collection houses newspapers that have long since ceased publication.

“The CDNC's massive repository of newspapers – nearly 1.5 million issues spanning over 21 million pages – date back to as early as the 1840s, allowing users to easily search for stories by date or keyword from the Californian, the first newspaper in the state, to the Black-owned and -operated San Francisco paper The Pacific Appeal and the Sacramento Daily Union, which offers a comprehensive look at daily life in the Gold Rush era,” noted an article on SF Gate.

The CDNC funding for the next fiscal year has not been removed, Geiger stated in his appeal. But the problem is that the archive cannot continue without funding for this year.

We’re equally troubled by how a blue state like California could have withheld the archive’s funding in the first place. This is something one would expect from a conservative state. And, speaking of conservatives, Republican President Donald Trump earlier this year ordered federal funding be cut from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as SF Gate reported. That was a result of Trump’s executive order, “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” So, far from being one of the first newspaper archives to be in financial dire straits, the California Digital Newspaper Collection could be a harbinger of what’s to come.

That would be an abysmal development. In this day and age, when so much history is being preserved online, that a huge digital newspaper collection could go dark is frightening.

We cannot stress what a valuable resource the UC Riverside digital collection is. In terms of LGBTQ history, the early issues of the B.A.R. – the paper started in 1971 – document the fabled drag community, gay bars, and early political efforts as the community flexed its muscle. Not to mention the horrific early years of the AIDS epidemic and the paper’s well-known obituaries that people submitted in honor of their deceased partners, friends, or family.

We certainly hope the wider California community rallies to this important effort to preserve history. If you want to contribute to save this valuable asset, Geiger has set up a donation link on the archive’s site at cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc.