openoni is a community maintained project developed from chronam, the Django application that the Library of Congress uses to make its Chronicling America website. The Chronicling America website makes millions of pages of historic American newspapers that have been digitized by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) browsable and searchable on the Web. A little bit of background is needed to understand why this software is being made available.

NDNP is actually a partnership between the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and cultural heritage organizations (awardees) across the United States who have applied for grants to help digitize newspapers in their state. Awardees digitize newspaper microfilm according to a set of specifications and then ship the data back to the Library of Congress where it is loaded into Chronicling America.

Awardee institutions are able to use this data however they want, including creating their own websites that highlight their newspaper content in the local context of their own collections. The idea of making openoni available here on Github is to provide a technical option to these awardees, or other interested parties who want to make their own websites of NDNP newspaper content available. openoni provides a core set of functionality for loading, modeling and indexing NDNP data, while allowing you to customize the look and feel of the website to suit the needs of your organization.

The NDNP data is in the Public Domain and is itself [available] (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/) on the Web for anyone to use. The hope is that the openoni software can be useful for others who want to work with and/or publish the content.

Open-ONI releases can be found on our releases page. Open-ONI is alpha software and documentation is incomplete at this time.

Please note: for development, look at the docker setup.

Production install instructions are still a work in progress. We reccomend installing from the latest release to evaluate the software. If you are interested in contributing code, please use the dev branch. Please see the contribute page on the wiki for details.

docker-compose -f test-compose.yml -p onitest up test

This will spew a lot of output and you'll have to scroll back a ways to get at test failure information. But it runs a test container setup that ensures your development data cannot possibly be modified.

We have a development slack at open-oni.slack.com. Please email kdalziel [at] unl.edu for an invite.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Documentation is in progress on the project Wiki.