Screenshot of Open ONI default theme home page

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.

See About for more information about the project's origins.

Install

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.

For more information, see our Resource Requirements and Dependency Roadmap.

Documentation

Documentation is available for all releases following 0.11. Docs can be found with the source code in the /docs directory.

Support

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.

Contact Us

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).

Security

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.

Contribute

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