Save the California Digital Newspaper Collection!
A Fundamental Emperor Norton Research Tool At Risk
California Legislature Poised to Ax Entire FY2026 Budget Appropriation of $430,000
THE EMPEROR NORTON TRUST has created the most respected contemporary account of the life and legacy of Emperor Norton.
Most respected because best documented.
This would not have been possible without the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) — a freely available digital clearinghouse of historical California newspapers based at the University of California Riverside.
Search result page from the California Digital Newspaper Collection. Source: CDNC
The CDNC trove includes original sources on the California life of Emperor Norton between his arrival in 1849 and his death in 1880 that no other digital clearinghouse of historical newspapers has. This includes:
a nearly complete set of the Pacific Appeal, the Black-owned and -operated San Francisco paper that published some 250 Proclamations of the Emperor between 1870 and 1875 ― by far the largest single body of Proclamations
the most complete collection of the Daily Alta California, San Francisco’s first daily: a paper that took great interest in Emperor Norton and — for better and worse — set the tone for how the Emperor was covered and understood during his lifetime
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A WEEK-AND-A-HALF ago, I and many other users and supporters of the California Digital Newspaper Collection received an email with the subject line: “California Digital Newspaper Collection Needs Your Help.”
The email, from CDNC director Brian Geiger, opened:
For the last decade we have received funding every year from the State Legislature. That funding has been cut from the 2026 budget. Without it, the CDNC will go offline and the work we do to preserve and digitize California newspapers will end.
Under the portion of the 2026 state budget currently making its way through the Education Finance subcommittees of the budget committees of both houses of the Legislature, CDNC would not experience simply a reduction in the state funding it needs in order to survive. This would be bad enough.
CDNC would be completely defunded by the state— to the tune of $430,000.
It would be a death sentence for CDNC.
It is impossible to overstate the negative impact of this possible outcome on The Emperor Norton Trust.
Virtually every one of the Trust's nearly 200 research articles published via our website features at least one — and often multiple — live links to CDNC. Because CDNC is not paywalled, any time a reader encounters a CDNC source on the Trust’s website, they are just a click away from seeing the referenced Proclamation of Emperor Norton or news item about the Emperor as — and where — it appeared in the paper where it originally was published.
This means that, if CDNC goes dark, it will not be only the Trust's future work that is hamstrung.
No. The quality, integrity, and future impact of the 12 years of the work that we already have done will be compromised, too.
How so? Because the upshot of countless now-dead links to CDNC in The Emperor Norton Trust’s articles will mean that publishers, historical institutions, news orgs, scholars, researchers, and others no longer will be able to use the Trust's own sourcing to independently verify our CDNC-based research.
The same will be true of any other historical research organization that uses CDNC in this way.
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SOME DOTS that may connect…
The funding that the California Digital News Collection receives from the state is administered by the California State Library (CSL).
CSL, for its part, receives federal funding from a small federal agency known as the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). CSL distributes much of this money in the form of grants to public library systems and branches in cities and towns across California.
In mid March, President Trump issued an executive order calling for IMLS and 6 other federal agencies to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
Two weeks later, most IMLS employees were placed on administrative leave. And CSL received notice from IMLS that the remainder of the $15.7M grant that IMLS awarded CSL in 2024 — about $3.4M — more than 21% of the total — had been canceled.
Whether the funding CDNC has received from the state comes directly from state revenues; from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services “bucket”; or from some combination of the two…
It stands to reason that California State Library’s unexpected $3.4M federal funding shortfall for this year — together with the possibility that CSL will see no federal money next year — is forcing state lawmakers to contemplate hard choices that they otherwise would not deem it necessary to consider.
What a shame that, apparently, that includes treating the California Digital Newspaper Collection and the historical research it facilitates as a dispensable luxury.
This short-sighted move becomes all the more inscrutable and hard to justify when one pauses to consider that $430,000 is but 0.00013% of the total California state budget of $322B.
Surely, in such a vast budget, a different comparatively miniscule $430,000 can be found that is more dispensable: a $430,000 crumb that lawmakers could withhold without — in that same action — playing the death march for one of the state’s most influential and respected historical research programs.
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THE CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION is doing work that no other organization, public or private, is doing — or will do.
In the great hope that it is not too late for CDNC, I encourage all who wish to preserve the availability of the best tools for researching 19th-century California history — and especially those who wish to help preserve the legacy and the future of research by The Emperor Norton Trust — to join the Trust in urging California state lawmakers to restore the $430,000 previously budgeted for CDNC in FY2026, so that this vital, non-negotiable, irreplaceable historical resource can continue uninterrupted.
Contact:
Senator John Laird
Chair, Subcommittee on Education Finance (full subcommittee roster)
California State Senate Budget & Fiscal Review Committee
Email
Assemblymember David A. Alvarez
Chair, Subcommittee on Education Finance (full subcommittee roster)
California State Assembly Budget Committee
Email
Over the last 12 years, I and The Emperor Norton Trust have used the California Digital Newspapers Collection nearly every day to document the life and legacy of the Emp.
We need to be able to it for the next 12 years and beyond.
Let’s keep CDNC open so that we can!
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