Joint Venture for the Cooperative Digitization and Dissemination of World Newspapers

NOTE: The RFP for Phase One has been withdrawn as of March 25, 2008.
View the complete RFP here

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS

Phase One:  Latin American Newspapers from the Era of Independence, State Formation, and Early Modernization, 1805-1923

Through a century of major, sustained investment in acquisition, documentation and preservation, North American research libraries have amassed a large and valuable corpus of newspapers from all regions of the world. Those libraries’ aggregate holdings of newspapers in paper and micro-formats constitute a body of historical and cultural evidence spanning four centuries, which is not, and could not be, replicated elsewhere. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and a number of major North American research libraries ("Affiliates") are considering systematic, large scale digitization of this corpus of world newspapers and news-related materials for scholarly access via the Web.

Such an initiative would require an ongoing, multi-stage commitment by CRL and affiliated libraries to combine expertise and resources, to digitize and make available holdings of newspapers from seven major world regions: 

• Latin America and the Caribbean
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• The Middle East
• South Asia
• Slavic and Eastern Europe
• Southeast Asia
• East Asia.

To this end, CRL and Affiliates invite electronic publishers, aggregators, and other organizations, both commercial and not-for-profit, (here “Vendors”) to submit proposals for partnership in this endeavor. Specifically, Vendors are invited to propose to provide one or more of the following sets of services: 

• Conversion (“Conversion Services”) of content from microfilm to digital format, and an appropriate level of markup, annotation, OCR conversion, and metadata production.
• Persistent and continuous Web-based access to the digitized content (“Access Services”) for members of designated CRL communities, with minimum functionality specified in the Request for Proposals and interoperability with related digital newspaper collections and/or other collections of primary source materials as appropriate.
• Other services and benefits of interest to CRL and its communities (“Other Services”). These might include, but are not necessarily limited to, access to additional electronic resources related to the digitized content, digital conversion of additional collections and materials of interest to CRL and its members, royalties, and archiving of the digitized content and related metadata to ensure their continued functionality and availability to CRL and its communities.

All inquiries may be sent to:

James Simon, Director of International Resources
Center for Research Libraries
6050 South Kenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
USA
Bus:  (773) 955-4545, ext 324
Fax:  (773) 955-4339
Email:  simon@crl.edu

The Center for Research Libraries is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.