Last April, word first began to circulate among users of the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) that the invaluable online resource—containing searchable archives of publications going back to 1846—could shut down permanently due to a loss of funding.
Money from the California State Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities and a private source tied to the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California, Riverside, which oversaw the collection, had all dried up within less than two months.
Surprisingly, by the time June arrived, much of that funding had been restored—but it did not come in time to stop the termination of the dedicated staff that had worked for more than a decade to grow the content and maintain its operations.
Daryle Williams is the dean of UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS), and among his many responsibilities is the management and oversight of CDNC operations. When the Independent previously reported on the CDNC last July, a UCR representative told us that Williams would not be available for an interview—but Williams took the time to speak with us recently regarding the status of the archives as 2026 progresses.
The good news, Williams said, is the CDNC, as it stands now, is more stable in terms of both technology and funding.
“I’m just going to be blunt: The project was in a precarious state,” Williams said of the CDNC as of mid-2025. “There were some real significant funding challenges, and also, from a technology perspective, and a maintenance perspective, and some management and oversight and leadership perspectives, things got a little dicey last year. The site went down several times. I didn’t know it at the time, but we came to understand that some of the technology was failing, and we were at the risk, and still are in a risky situation, of literally losing material. We think we’ve identified most of those risks and taken steps to mitigate that. So, the site is up. It may go down every once in a while now for hours, but we’re not talking large-scale outages that were real in the middle of last year.
“So the preservation of, and access to, this resource is much more stable than it was even in the last six months. … We had commitments to get it done, but it was not clear that we were actually going to be able to accomplish it as a day-to-day kind of thing.”
Williams said one of the CDNC’s problems involved out-of-date servers.
“They were beginning to fail, so we’ve replaced some servers,” Williams said. “We just bought a new one. … We have some continuing and new technical team (members) that are looking at this closely, monitoring (website performance) and being responsive to when we have outages.”
Another problem was “bot” attacks.
“People were trying to attack the site, and we had denial of service,” he said. “So we’ve upgraded the software, and we’re in a stronger position in terms of security as well. This was the right thing to do, but it was not clear what was happening (in terms of funding) until the end of June. Now we have a guarantee of a state appropriation … of $430,000. … This will be foundational for base funding for us to move through this period right now. We’re really doing substantive work to back up the material and make sure the site remains stable and sustainable.”
New and meaningful partnerships are now a focus for Williams as part of his multi-pronged strategy to secure the CDNC’s operations.
“This resource is a resource of the people of California, and has been entrusted to the regents of the University of California, and it will remain so. But we have every need and interest in finding friends and partners who are able to join us, and bring what they can to the table.”
Daryle Williams, dean of UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
“There will be a press release in the next month, but we’ve been able to identify some new partners in the state of California—some recognized partners who are very interested in the state’s history, life and culture, digital preservation and experience, and have resources who are committed to partnering with us on this ongoing preservation and access,” he said. “This resource is a resource of the people of California, and has been entrusted to the regents of the University of California, and it will remain so. But we have every need and interest in finding friends and partners who are able to join us, and bring what they can to the table. We need more technical infrastructure. We need more technical expertise.”
Williams pledged that the CDNC would not be commercialized.
“(We’re looking for) other institutions, public or private, that still want to begin from the public good, and the public good is associated with the free press—access to the free press’ information, and access to one’s history,” he said. “Let’s be blunt about what’s found in California newspapers—terribly ugly things that are in the long history of the California press. … But we need to have access to ugly things, and uncomfortable things, so we can understand who we are and where we come from.”
Williams also expressed a desire to team up with other, smaller newspaper collections throughout the state.
“The origin of the (CDNC) project was really (focused on) the press mainly in the parts of Northern California that were built around the time of the California gold rush, which makes sense,” Williams said. “For the most part, that’s the origins of what we now call California. … My understanding is (that in the 2010s), there was this new project to make sure that every county of the state had at least two titles that were part of the CDNC. That required the work of identifying through county libraries, but also historical associations in the state: What physical collections did they have, and how could we have access to those collections that have been digitized? That work of broad breadth and representation of California experiences and voices, we want to continue as well.”
That said, Williams confirmed that adding new digital content to the more than 50 million pages of digitized newspaper pages already in the archive, of which some 20-plus million pages are currently searchable, is not an immediate priority.
“Right now, we’re not taking any new materials,” he said. “That’s one of the things we’re pretty clear on. Right now, we’re cleaning up a couple of projects that were disrupted and suspended mid-work, especially projects associated with this NEH grant which focused in on African-American newspapers from the Los Angeles and Bay areas. We’ve got to finish that work first, so we’re not taking any new projects. I’m not saying we’re not going to in the future, but there’s no new material, other than the things which we already committed to, that we’re looking at right now.”
It’s clear that an air of uncertainty hangs over the future of the CDNC, despite the obvious progress that’s been made by the dean and his team. It’s also clear that the will to stabilize and improve access to this major cultural and academic repository exists.
“I’m the dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences,” Williams said. “My day job is assuring the high-quality education of 11,000 undergraduates, and the professional development of my faculty and staff. The CDNC is part of my portfolio, but it is not my primary job. It’s not primarily what the people of California are paying me for—but this is really important, so I’ve taken some of my personal time, and also (utilized) the authorities that I have, to get us out of the hole we were in. And you can quote that.
“Let’s be excited about, and proud of, the resource and the accomplishment. We’ve now, for more than two decades, had this tremendous resource available to the people of California, due in large part to the investments by the people of California, through state appropriations, through public interest, but also through the support of the University of California. (Now, we’re working) to build out access and preserve this resource of California’s print history and all the things that have been recorded and taken place in newspapers in California. There’s a long-standing accomplishment there, and I think we should be proud of that.”