Overview:
The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection has digitized more than 8.4 million pages from over 1,035 newspapers across the state.
When the High Plains Library District bought the former Greeley Tribune building in 2019, it inherited a room full of local history.
“They left behind their morgue, or the room that contained all of their volumes, dating back 1870 to 2019,” said librarian Cindy Welsh. “They said to us, ‘You can keep them, or you can pitch them,’ and we were not about to pitch over 1,200 volumes about newspapers of community history.”
The library district wanted to preserve the papers, but it also wanted people to be able to use them. That led Welsh to the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, a free online archive managed by the Colorado State Library.
Launched in 2005 as a joint project of the Colorado State Library, History Colorado and the Collaborative Digitization Program, the collection now includes more than 8.4 million digitized pages from more than 1,035 Colorado newspaper titles published from 1859 to 2025.
Leigh Jeremias, digital collections senior consultant for the Colorado State Library, joined the project in 2015 as the collection was transitioning into the database it still uses today. After the project could no longer rely on grant funding alone, the Colorado State Library took over management. Today, Jeremias said, the collection uses a partner-funded model.
“So what that means for us is that I work with institutions throughout the state of Colorado that will fund the digitization of their local paper,” Jeremias said.
Those partners are often museums, archives, libraries, historical societies, private individuals and publishers. The Colorado State Library supports the staff, content management systems, server costs and yearly maintenance needed to keep the archive online.
For High Plains Library District, the collection’s New Content Support Program helped make the Greeley Tribune project possible. The program offered $3,000 with a one-quarter match to begin digitizing newspapers.
“We hadn’t put any digitizing costs in our budget, because we really weren’t expecting to inherit a very large, over-century-old newspaper collection,” Welsh said. “It was easy enough to get the match, and then they did all the heavy lifting technically.”
Newspapers can be digitized from original papers or from microfilm. Digitizing from microfilm can produce lower-quality images, especially for photographs, but some newspapers now exist only in microfilm form. Direct scans can also be more expensive, so partners sometimes use microfilm because it still preserves the text.
“We develop a project, whatever fits within their budget, and then I work on getting the originals or the microfilm from wherever that may be,” Jeremias said. “Then we work with a local vendor who does the scanning and creates TIF files. Once the files are created, we have another vendor that does the metadata creation.”
That metadata process includes optical character recognition, or OCR, which converts images of printed words into searchable text. After the metadata is created, the files are returned to the Colorado State Library and uploaded to the collection.
“They have already worked out all the kinks, figuring out who’s the best entity to do the actual scanning, applying the OCR, doing the segmentation, and then hosting it on an accessible website,” Welsh said. “That was an expense that the library district wasn’t ready to take on.”
But with help from the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, the High Plains Library District was able to preserve volumes of the Greeley Tribune. This preservation makes records more accessible, as researchers would otherwise have to search microfilms of original newspapers.
“Microfilm is still a great preservation tool,” Jeremias said, “but as an access tool, it’s cumbersome.”
OCR is not perfect, especially with older newspapers. If the software misreads a word, a search for that word may not find the article. To improve the archive, users with free accounts can correct text themselves.
Jim England has corrected more than 556,870 lines of text and is currently fourth in the collection’s Text Correctors Hall of Fame.
“When the papers were digitized, especially very early papers, the character recognition was really in its infancy,” England said. “So if you look at the page and then the transcript next to it, in the old papers, it was just gibberish. You couldn’t find two sentences in a row together, sometimes not even two words. And so I realized that there was this tremendous cache of untapped historical documents.”
Creating a free account also allows users to save private lists of newspapers, download PDFs, print articles and email pages.
England said correcting text helped him discover stories about Colorado he would not have otherwise found. For example, England found in old newspaper archives that Colorado Day, August 1, was also celebrated as Black Emancipation Day in the 1800s.
“I realized that that was a really good way for me to find stories about the history of Colorado that I otherwise wouldn’t have learned about.” England said. “It kind of forced me to delve into the collection and really start just finding stuff that I never would have found out on my own.”
Jeremias recalled hearing from someone whose father had served in the Korean War but rarely talked about it. After he died, the family found a newspaper article showing he had received a Purple Heart. Welsh said a retired teacher uses old Greeley Tribune stories to find background on athletes being inducted into a school athletic hall of fame.
Jeremias argues that these discoveries are part of what makes local newspapers so valuable.
“There’s so many small communities throughout the U.S., but certainly in Colorado, where their history was not really preserved in a museum, so their history exists in the newspapers,” Jeremias said. “This is a great way to preserve that history for them.”
The High Plains Library District used the support program for two years before dedicating its own money to digitization, Welsh said. That allowed the district to keep moving while leaving support funds available for smaller communities that need them more.
“I’m always amazed by the amount of financial support that they will give to something like this, because the process of digitization and preservation and newspapers is not an insignificant cost,” Jeremias said. “They’re really wanting to make their community history available to anybody freely.”
England said Colorado’s collection stands out because it is free, broad and easy to search.
“Other newspaper databases around the country, a lot of them are for pay, and even if they are free, are really poorly organized or really limited in the scope of their collections,” England said. “Colorado’s is about the best I’ve ever found.”
For Welsh, that accessibility makes her job easier and brings the Greeley Tribune’s history back to the public.
“It makes my life easier when I don’t have to explain to a patron, ‘Well, first, you gotta get a library card, and then we’ve got to get you signed up, and we gotta get you a subscription,’” Welsh said. “All I have to say is, ‘Google Colorado historic newspapers.’ You’re there.”
