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Catholic Newspapers Program (CNP)

"Students love to click to their sources, rather than going through hard-bound newspaper issues in the stacks."

--Paula Kane, Marous Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, on why she refers her students to the Directory of Catholic Newspapers Online

newspaper_catholic_herald.jpgThe Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) initiated the Catholic Newspapers Program (CNP) in 2011.  The goal and scope of the program, overseen by the Catholic Newspapers Committee, is to provide access to all extant Catholic newspapers published in North America.  These program activities include:

  • An environmental scan of North American Catholic newspapers to determine what newspapers exist, where they are located, and the extent of holdings and formats.  A summer 2012 pilot project at the University of Notre Dame resulted in the identification of 800+ titles.
  • The Directory of Catholic Newspapers Online. Please review the current listings and help populate this list by sending us information about digitized or born-digital Catholic newspapers!
  • Collaborative digitization of papers of interest with the help of our Digitizing Partners. Initial efforts are focused here while simultaneously providing encouragement, guidance, and support to others interested in digitizing Catholic papers. 
  • Implementation of a shared repository for Catholic newspapers, including papers of interest and beyond. The repository will contain already-digitized and born-digital content. The Catholic News Archive is freely available now!
  • Implementation of the Catholic News Archive Community News Hosting Service that provides a secure, professional-grade, reliable and search-engine-friendly solution for publishers of Catholic news seeking to maintain an online archive of current and/or historical issues. The Catholic News Archive Community News Hosting Service is here.
  • Creation of a comprehensive directory of North American Catholic newspapers, freely available to all, via the International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) database; CRRA works with member institutions and partners to contribute title and holdings data to ICON.

For those interested in historic newspapers, you may also wish to consult the directory or pages of historic American newspapers in Chronicling America.

We are a non-profit, collaborative organization.  We welcome and encourage your participation to create enduring global access to Catholic newspapers.  For more on how you can help, please contact CRRA staff members Breanne Clark, Association Manager or Todd Jensen, Project Manager, Catholic News Archive. 

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