The last two decades have produced an unprecedented volume of digitized historical newspapers, requiring the creation of multiple and expansive points of access. The process of transforming these archives into machine-readable data remains a dynamic and ongoing endeavor. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of Chronicling America, a combined effort by the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and 50 state and jurisdiction partnerships to create one of the great feats of open access, aggregated historical data in the United States. With 21 million pages of newspaper content from 3 million newspaper issues in 19 languages and spanning over three centuries openly available, Chronicling America offers a chance to reflect on the relationship between the digitally remediated print archive and literary and cultural research achievements, needs, and opportunities.

This panel, with a combination of scholarly makers and practitioners, will examine the processes by which the newspaper record has been made visible, as well as how scholars use and reuse this collection. Each presentation will last 10-13 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.

It will address questions such as:

1. How has Chronicling America shifted its focus from “papers of records” to newspapers that reflect underrepresented histories and groups?
2. What is the status of indices and directories, in codices and online, of historical newspapers?
3. How does the existing metadata illuminate and how does it obscure the histories of historically underrepresented groups in the creation and consumption of the news?
4. What is the status of open access newspaper digitization in relation to proprietary newspaper digitization?
5. What are the lessons for open access digital aggregation that Chronicling America might share?

Molly Hardy will open the panel with an introduction to Chronicling America and its efforts in recent years to incorporate more newspapers that reflect underrepresented histories. She will also reflect on the politics of representation in digital aggregation and share areas of potential growth for Chronicling America.

Robin Pike from the Library of Congress will then feature initiatives the Library of Congress team has completed for history and heritage months, to enhance description of African American newspapers, and to make topics in Black and Hispanic histories more accessible to patrons. Pike will also highlight Chronicling America’s impact on user groups and how the Library of Congress has been increasing visibility of the underlying data and local stories within the newspapers.

Turning to current scholarly uses of Chronicling America, Daniel J Evans will then present an environmental scan that compares historic nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US newspaper directories to the current digital record. Evans will focus on the ways in which historic compiled datasets influenced both the catalog record and known newspaper digital archives. He will outline the status of indices and directories, in codices and online, of historical newspapers. Through a computational analysis of the data from private companies, non-profits, and government sources, Evans will point to biases in the original data compilation and suggest ways in which the datasets derived from the original newspaper directories have come to define future digitization and preservation work.

And finally, Joshua Ortiz Baco will also address questions of bias in large scale aggregation by looking at the emergent focus on ethnic newspapers—historically less preserved and documented. Examining how ethnic newspapers pose unique challenges for their preservation and access due to specific editorial practices embedded within ethnic editorship, Ortiz Baco will explore how creators and users of digitized collections have leveraged linked data and Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records alongside title essays – detailed descriptions written by specialists – to reconstruct the complex editorial practices of ethnic newspapers. This approach will also highlight how ethnic newspapers’ nuanced material culture and paratext, reflective of rich editorial legacies in ethnic newspaper histories, necessitates collaborations between the stewards and the users of digitized newspaper collections.