Augusta - In many families, the holidays provide an opportunity for generations to gather and share stories about the past. If your holiday tradition includes browsing through family photographs and memorabilia, the Maine State Library asking you to keep an eye out French-language newspapers published in Maine that might be stored away with other family heirlooms. Those papers may help fill in some important gaps in an upcoming project that aims to borrow and digitize historical newspapers that captured news and opinion pertaining to Maine's Franco communities.

The project grew out of work by the Franco American Programs at the University of Maine to track down historical newspapers from Franco communities in Maine. While their efforts identified at least 33 French-language newspaper titles that were published in the period from 1870 to the 1970s, only 16 of those publications have any holdings that can be tracked down in a library, historical society or museum collection. For those newspapers that do remain, their conditions vary widely and few are available in digital format.

"We are afraid that some of these titles may have been completely lost to time," said Adam Fisher, director of collections development at the Maine State Library. "Our last hope is that someone may have copies squirreled away in the back of a closet or in an attic and would be willing to loan them to us so that we can take images of the pages for the purposes of digitization and preservation."

The library is also working with a number of Maine institutions to obtain and digitize their holdings of Maine French-language newspapers.

The digitization project is supported with funding from the National Digital Newspaper Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. All of the pages digitized will become part of the Library of Congress Chronicling America historical newspaper portal at www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

For more information about Maine State Library newspaper digitization activities, visit www.maine.gov/msl/newspapers or call the library at 207-287-5600.