The University of California, Riverside’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) learned back in April that state funding for the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) online archive, approved by the Legislature last year for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, would not be coming to the CDNC after all.
The 20-year veteran director of the college’s Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR), Brian Geiger, determined that the funds had likely been used elsewhere by the State Library. At the time, Geiger estimated that the CBSR would be about $300,000 in debt as a result of this state-funding failure. He launched a public fundraising campaign to try to bridge the gap, which was somewhat successful, netting about $110,000. He later learned that the state had funded the CDNC archive moving forward—and that federal funding to help the project had been restored as well.
Despite all of this good news, however, the future of the California Digital Newspaper Collection (cdnc.ucr.edu) remains unclear—and Geiger is now unemployed, along with the rest of his CBSR team.
The CDNC includes content from hundreds of newspapers that have been published throughout the state, going back as far as 1846. The archives include articles from defunct area publications like the Palm Springs News (from 1934-1951), the Palm Desert Post (1963-1999) and Palm Desert’s short-lived Post Script (1980-81). Thanks to an investment of nearly $300,000 by the city of Palm Springs, it also includes The Desert Sun archives from 1934 to 1993. As of this writing, there 23,449,221 pages in the CDNC archive, which had always been free to search and view.
As Geiger started the fundraising campaign in the spring, he did not reveal that he and his three CBSR staff members were all given 60-day termination notices in late April. June 27 was their final day of employment.
“The center (had) four full time employees at that point, and we were all let go. So, the center is essentially closed now,” Geiger recently told the Independent.
The homepage of the archive now includes a statement, dated July 11, from Daryle Williams, dean of the UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. “UCR is actively working on a sustainable model for the CDNC to continue to be available to the public. Effective July 1, 2025, the Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research functions under the direct oversight of the Office of the Dean within the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS),” it says, in part.
Geiger expressed confusion at this statement. “There’s really no CBSR there anymore,” he said.
Local Concerns
Jeannie Kays is the director of library services for the city of Palm Springs. The Independent spoke to her back in May about the California Digital Newspaper Collection’s funding problems. She and Randy Lovely, the president of the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation, had just written in an opinion piece for The Desert Sun: “The CDNC is not a luxury—it is a foundational public good. Preserving local journalism isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about continuity. Without access to our past, we are unmoored in the present and blind to the future.”
In a recent follow-up interview, Kays expressed dismay when told that Geiger had been terminated from UCR.
“That’s sad. That is really sad, because he’s the heart of this project,” she said. “He is the lifeblood. … He was my only point of contact, the only person I ever dealt with, for our Desert Sun archive. He knew everything about it. He negotiated the deals for the scanning, helped us with our grants and provided us with a hard-drive backup of our archive.”
Geiger said that he and his team worked in their last weeks on the job to stabilize the site’s operations, wrap up content acquisitions, and assure physical asset security, among other chores. Still, he expressed concerns about what the future would hold for the archive’s users around the world.
“My main priority was trying to organize what we have in such a way that someone could come in and manage it well, find new homes for the microfilm that we have, and figure out what to do with the newsprint (which had been obtained, but not yet digitized),” Geiger said. “And then, in the last week, I provided as much detail about the digital collection (as I could), so that it could keep running and potentially find a new home after we left.
“Right before the center closed, we had done some work in the data center, and the site was responding very slowly. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still is. But I think it’s more or less stable, and the vendor that we’ve worked with for years, who maintains the hosting software, is really great to work with. I imagine UCR will lean on them for the next while, and get their help keeping the collection accessible.”
If that was indeed the thinking, the plan may be faltering, at least temporarily. During our interview, Kays decided to go on the archive website and try to use it as she normally does when performing research.
“The OCR (optical character recognition) on the side is readable, but when I click to download the PDF, it just says, ‘PDF file cannot be read,’” Kays said. “So it’s essentially not working, and that makes me sad, (because the Palm Springs Library) spent about $300,000 for this. We’ve been working on this since 2013.”
(A search using the archive, done just before this story went to press, encountered similar issues. While the search function worked, the actual newspaper pages were inaccessible. A message at the top of the website said: “We are aware that images are currently not being displayed, and are working on fixing the problem.”)
Kays said that when she last spoke to Geiger prior to his departure, “He just said, ‘We have to wrap up this project by the end of (June).’ And then he asked a question: ‘Do you have your backups?’ And I responded, ‘I have most of my backups, but there’s some information that’s missing.’ And then darkness, nothing.”
Funded but Unstaffed
Given that the California Digital Newspaper Collection was inaccessible as of this story’s publication, it’s clear that the termination of CBSR team is causing problems.
The decision to fire Geiger and his team is particularly hard to understand in light of the fact that state and federal funding, which was intended to support both the CDNC and CBSR operations through fiscal 2025-2026, was reinstated shortly before the end of June. One of the CBSR’s efforts was the California Newspaper Project, “a multi-year effort by the CBSR to identify, describe and preserve California newspapers.” The California Digital Newspaper Collection was part of that larger effort.
“The state funding, which was officially restored, was for the California Newspaper Project, and not solely the California Digital Newspaper Collection,” Geiger said. “So, that (July 11 statement on the CDNC website) really says nothing about continued preservation or digitization of California newspapers. If the dean plans to manage the CBSR, then traditionally one of the roles of the center was to be the sole place in California working to preserve and digitize California newspapers. So, it seems like (the status of) that work should be addressed too, and not just the digital archive.”
Ironically, on June 27, his last day on the job, Geiger received an email from the federal government’s National Endowment for the Humanities informing him that the CBSR funding as part of the National Daily Newspaper Program had been restored.
“That (funding) was terminated in April,” Geiger explained, “and that’s kind of what started this downward spiral for CBSR. … That’s not my problem now, but I’m not quite sure how UCR is going to meet the demands of that grant. It’s pretty technical, and we spent many years coming up to speed on the grant requirements.”
The Independent requested an interview with Daryle Williams to discuss the future of the California Newspaper Project and the California Digital Newspaper Collection. In response, we received an email from John Warren, UCR’s senior director of news and content, which read: “The dean will not be available for an interview. However, the college has placed a statement on the CDNC web page related to the archive’s status. This is all the information we have now. We expect to have further information in the coming months. Thanks for your interest.”
Since Williams would not answer our questions, we asked Geiger why he thought he and his colleagues were terminated, despite the restored funding.
“The justification given was lack of funds,” Geiger said. “Not only was the state funding fully restored, but we raised somewhere over $110,000 through donations to help support us. At the beginning of every fiscal year, I would do budget projections for the fall to make sure we have enough funds to cover (our expenses). I didn’t do it this year, because the center was closing, but the other day, I sat down, and just for kicks, I said, ‘OK, what would our expenses have been?’ I did a budget projection based on the restoration of the funding and the approximately $110,000 that we raised in donations, and it looked to me like we would have been short, at the most, about $50,000 to $60,000 in fiscal year 2025. … I never actually saw a budget from the dean’s office. I don’t know what their budget projections are, and what they thought expenses would be. I can’t imagine that the restored funding will not actually cover the rising costs of personnel, technology and cybersecurity. I’ve been doing budgets for this for two decades, and I have a pretty good sense of what would have been covered.
“Of course, part of our funding did come from the college, and if they’re not willing to support (the CBSR and CNDC) anymore, then, of course, there won’t be sufficient funds to cover the work.”
Worries About the Content
Jeannie Kays expressed frustration that The Desert Sun content her team had worked to preserve and make accessible—with financial support from the city of Palm Springs—could be in jeopardy.
“I’m not the only small archive that joined in on this project,” Kays said. “That’s how we all were able to make this work. We worked as a team to bring this bigger picture to life. The Desert Sun archive isn’t just for Coachella Valley residents. It’s for people who are researching the Coachella Valley, who used to live here, or maybe might want to live here. It’s global. It’s not just a local issue, and the unfortunate (potential) loss of this database has a ripple effect.”
Geiger summed up his two-decade CDNC work by saying: “I hope that the project, the CDNC as it exists, can continue. I’m sorry that work on preserving newspapers might be at least interrupted, if not stopped.
“Also, I would like to emphasize my thanks to the hundreds and probably thousands of Californians who responded to my email requests to contact the (Legislature’s) budget subcommittee members and ask them to renew the California Newspaper Project’s funding. Without their efforts, the governor and Legislature might not have approved it. Because I lost access to the CDNC email list, I wasn’t able to follow up with the roughly 30,000 subscribers. But I would like them to know how much I appreciate their efforts and their concern for the work we did.”
Kays said she’s worried not just about the digital archive; she’s worried about the current and future status of the physical content, both microfilm and print-copy assets, in the possession of the California Newspaper Project.
“Who will be the steward of that?” she asked. “The University of California system … is where this content lives, the physical items. How do they digitize this content? They either get it off of a negative, or they’re pulling out the newspapers, and they’re taking pictures of them on their scanners. So who’s going to be the steward, and who’s going to preserve that content and make sure that it doesn’t get thrown in the trash?”
Geiger said he, too, is worried about the security of physical assets.
“There was a large collection of rare newsprint from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County that I had just picked up, in probably March,” Geiger said. “I’m estimating thousands of pages of newsprint that had never been microfilmed or preserved. … Someone in the early 20th century had collected a lot of rare newsprints. Someone knew what (archives) had survived and what hadn’t, and made a point of collecting stuff that was really unique. We assumed that collection with the intent to preserve it. Also, we’ve been working on another collection up in the Big Bear area, a long run of a title—about 50 years that had never been preserved. … It was the Crestline Courier, and I hope that collection has been returned to its owner.
“Unfortunately, that’s how history gets lost, right? In these moments of disruption, stuff falls through the cracks and isn’t recovered.”