On August 11, 1787, five years before Kentucky's statehood, the Kentucke Gazette became the first newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains. The four-page weekly hailed from America's farthest inland station, Lexington, an isolated yet emergent center for trade and culture that would come to be known as The Athens of the West. Nine years after the nation's independence, the closest newspaper was still 300 miles to the east. Pioneers in Virginia's then western district, known as Fayette County, had no expeditious means of communication with each other, and the territory's burgeoning government had no unified voice with the rest of the country. The Gazette solved both problems, and for sixty-one years, it kept America's western frontier connected to the world.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth of Kentucky became the fifteenth state in the Union. At the turn of the 19th century, weekly newspapers were blooming from the state's new rural settlements. By April 4, 1826, Kentucky had its first daily with Louisville's Public Advertiser, which also happened to be the first daily newspaper west of the Alleghenies. In the 1860's, America's Civil War took a toll on newspaper production, particularly in the South, where only 182 weeklies in twelve states survived. Despite that, Kentucky's journalistic endeavors thrived, and by 1869, the Kentucky Newspaper Association had formed as the 10th oldest similar organization in the United States. That same year, Kentucky's newspaper of record, Louisville's Courier-Journal, was born and is still in print. With the exception of a handful of newspapers from Kentucky's largest cities, virtually every newspaper in the state was, and still is, a county weekly. With 120 counties, more than any other state its size, Kentucky has amassed a rich newspaper tradition over the past two centuries.

In the early 1950s, as part of the University of Kentucky Libraries' mission, Kentucky's historian laureate, the late Dr. Thomas D. Clark, and the director of UK Libraries, the late Dr. Lawrence Thompson, together set out to preserve on microfilm as many historic newspapers as could be found. By 1981, UK Libraries was filming nearly 200 Kentucky newspapers, current and historic, and was an original participant in the United States Newspaper Program (USNP). Today, UK Libraries' Preservation Reformatting Center (PRC) continues the tradition by adding current and historic Kentucky newspapers to the vault's 30,000 reel master negative collection. Remarkably, PRC still operates a full-service microfilm lab, an increasingly rare commodity in the digital era. With an array of top-performance cameras and duplicating gear, only the highest quality polyester-based silver halide microfilm camera master, print master, and positive microfilms are produced and shipped around the world.

In 1997, UK Libraries' Digital Programs was selected by the Kentucky Virtual Library (KYVL) to manage the Kentuckiana Digital Library (KDL). In addition to administering the technical system infrastructure, Digital Programs also digitizes historic collections from around the state. With the Digital Lab's arsenal of state-of-the-art microfilm and flatbed scanners, copy and studio cameras, and myriad software applications, a variety of notable collections have been digitized over the years such as Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of Kentucky, 145 years of UK's Board of Trustee Meeting Minutes, Russell Lee and Louis Nollau photograph collections, Herald-Leader and Lafayette Studios Negative collections, a host of paper archives, and more than 700 oral history audio interviews from the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. After only five years, federal funding was granted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for Beyond the Shelf: Serving Historic Kentuckiana through Virtual Access (BTS). The two-year project made available online over 1000 rare and imperiled Kentuckiana books, providing a rich corpus whose content is still growing.

On the heels of the Beyond the Shelf's success, UK Libraries' Preservation Services (of which the PRC is part) and Digital Programs became a single unit, Preservation and Digital Programs (UKPDP). After the many years with newspapers, microfilm, and digital conversion, by 2004, UKPDP was prepared to bring newspaper preservation into the 21st century. Enter the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) chose UKPDP as one of only six participant states for NDNP's first two-year cycle (2005-2007). Phase One, its date range encompassing a single decade 1900-1910, produced more than 110,000 digital page images. With over 450 titles to choose from during that decade, KY-NDNP digitized 37 of Kentucky's most beloved newspapers representing all six geographic regions of the Commonwealth.

What set Kentucky apart from the other NDNP participants, however, was not only the high number of digitized titles, far more than any other awardee, but also that KY-NDNP used an entirely in-house film-to-digital methodology. Every digital page image was created on the University of Kentucky campus — from microfilm duplication to the deliverable digital data. Known as The Kentucky Test Bed, it was a time and labor intensive approach that no other awardee tried, then or now, but one that proved valuable to NDNP development.

With Phase Two nearly complete (1880-1910), the original 37 titles were retroactively digitized and six new titles added to the mix. By June 2009, another 100,000+ digital page images from 43 Kentucky newspapers will be available in both the Library of Congress' Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers and the KDL. (Incidentally, the KDL currently has available four Kentucky newspapers that are not presented through Chronicling America.)

By the end of Phase Three, in 2011, with the date range for all titles expanded to include 1860-1923, KY-NDNP will have targeted for digitization some one million pages of historic Kentucky newspapers, including Louisville's Courier-Journal. Because the Library of Congress specifications for Phase Three allow color scans to be included in the national corpus, a more accurate surrogate of the Courier-Journal can be assembled online by replacing black and white scans from microfilm with full color scans of the those pages printed with color. These color pages are astonishingly rich in texture after a century, and they provide a glimpse of Kentucky life, culture, and expertise that too few ever see or understand.

For more on the program and Kentucky's role in it, see NDNP and The Kentucky Edition.