Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open ONI) is a community-maintained project to make historic American newspapers browsable and searchable on the web. We aim to enable individual state and library-based newspaper collections to more easily provide these core capabilities, as well as develop new common features and improvements.
Read our About Open ONI web page for more information about the project's origins and history.
Visit sites currently powered by Open ONI:
- Historic Oregon Newspapers
- Nebraska Newspapers
- North Carolina Newspapers
- Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive
View "Sites using Open ONI" in our wiki for links to the sites' source code.
Open ONI requires newspaper data in specific files and formats which comprise a "batch". We provide small sample batches for testing and documentation on how to create a batch. The Library of Congress also provides Chronicling America newspapers as batches.
Open ONI does not currently provide tools to create batches, but the University of Oregon and University of Nebraska-Lincoln were awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to develop software and features to assist with batch creation, enable issue editing, and update the Open ONI front end framework alongside an accessibility / user experience audit.
To evaluate the software, we recommend downloading the latest Open ONI
release and following installation documentation. If you're interested in more recent changes, check out the dev branch.
This is a ballpark estimate of resources we recommend for running Open ONI in production. Open ONI is quite capable with minimal processing and memory resources.
| CPU | Memory | Storage (with TIFFs) | Storage (JP2s only) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Modern CPU with two (virtual) cores | 6GB | 1TB per ~25K pages | 1TB per ~100K pages |
We share more information on the Resource Usage page in our wiki, which may further inform your resource allocation.
| Component | Version | Supported Until | Next Target Release | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 3.8 | 2024-10 | 3.10 | https://peps.python.org/pep-0569/#lifespan |
| Django | 3.2 LTS | 2024-04 | 4.2 LTS, 2023-04 | https://www.djangoproject.com/download/#supported-versions |
| MariaDB | 10.6 | 2026-07-06 | Next LTS in ~2 years | https://mariadb.org/about/#maintenance-policy |
| Solr | 8.x | Approx 2022, based on ~18mo major release cycle | TBD | https://lucene.apache.org/solr/downloads.html#about-versions-and-support |
| RAIS | 4.x | Unknown | TBD | https://github.com/uoregon-libraries/rais-image-server |
| jQuery | 3.6.0 | Unknown | TBD | https://github.com/jquery/jquery/wiki/Roadmap |
| Bootstrap | 3.4.1 | 2019-07-24 | Upgrade as part of NEH grant | https://github.com/twbs/release |
| OpenSeadragon | 2.4.2 | Unknown | 3.x | https://github.com/openseadragon/openseadragon |
| tablesorter | 2.31.3 | Unknown | TBD | https://github.com/Mottie/tablesorter/wiki/Changes |
- Installation, Configuration, and Troubleshooting
- Changelog
- Contribute
- About Open ONI, Project History
Note that maintainers can only provide a minimal amount of assistance while working on Open ONI part-time. Developers cannot be expected to provide extensive one-on-one support.
We are glad to provide support specifically related to Open ONI, but anyone wanting to work with Open ONI should begin with some foundational knowledge of Linux, Docker, Apache, Python, Django, Solr, MariaDB/MySQL, and IIIF. There are other resources and communities better suited to aid in getting started and familiar with those technologies, so general assistance with them falls outside the scope of what to expect Open ONI developers to provide.
We ask that bugs and feature requests be submitted to Open ONI on GitHub. Please confine other questions and conversation about Open ONI development and use to Open ONI's Slack. These guidelines are intended both to keep conversation in the open where it may benefit all of the Open ONI community and to protect developers' already limited time.
We prefer to communicate on the Open ONI Slack, but if you have trouble or prefer not to use Slack, email Greg Tunink (techgique [at] unl.edu).
To report a security concern or vulnerability, please ask for a project maintainer to direct message you on the Open ONI Slack or email Greg Tunink (techgique [at] unl.edu). Maintainers will evaluate, discuss responsible disclosure and patching, and give many thanks and credit for your generous assistance.
If you are interested in collaborating on the project, please review CONTRIBUTING.md for more details. Everyone interacting within the Open ONI community is expected to follow the Open ONI Community Code of Conduct
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0