The California Digital Newspaper Collection is a repository of historical California newspapers published from 1846-present, including the first California newspaper, the Californian, and the first daily Californian newspaper, the Daily Alta California. It also contains issues of current California newspapers, collected as PDFs, that are part of a project to preserve and provide access to contemporary papers. In 2025, the Collection included 1,525,341 issues, comprising 23,449,221 pages and 53,713,870 articles.

GVR uses the CDNC as its most common source for the news heard in our programming. We explore news from multiple newspapers, but the newspaper we most commonly pull stories from is the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which is an ongoing newspaper in Santa Cruz, California that reaches back to 1884. This newspaper serves as our research’s North Star for a few reasons:

• Small Town/City: Santa Cruz is a small enough community that their main newspaper has MANY local stories, which we edit and use for our Local Beat segments!
• Near A Big City: Santa Cruz is only a hop, skip, and jump from San Francisco, which means the Sentinel publishes larger news stories about the country and world at large.
• Fashion Pieces: The fashion stories heard in our program almost exclusively come from the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s fashion column, written by Mary Hampton. Learn more about the real fashion correspondent Mary Hampton HERE.
• Consistency & Organization: Not every newspaper has a consistency in its organization, publication, and featured articles. Researching the Sentinel is a fairly seamless process and provides reliable coverage of the topics we explore.

https://washingtondigitalnewspapers.org

Washington Digital Newspapers brings together over 600,000 pages from Washington’s earliest Territorial newspapers to the present day. Freely accessible to the public, this growing collection complements the Washington State Library’s physical collection of more than 6,500 newspaper titles.

Newspaper digitization has been made possible through the National Digital Newspaper Program and with Library Services and Technology Act funding through the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

GVR uses WDN for supplemental news research, and as a backup when the California Digital Newspaper Collection is down for maintenance or server issues.

The Enterprise is one paper in Washington Digital Newspapers which we research to ensure we are covering stories from the perspective of black Americans. The Enterprise was one of the most successful African American newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, and spans 1921-1952.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/

The Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection provides access to select digitized newspaper pages produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress.

GVR uses Chronicling America as a final backup if the CDNC and WDN are unavailable when we conduct research. We also use it when needing to get more in-depth articles about important national and international stories.

The Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) is a database of over 400,000 American master recordings from the 78rpm era, with over 70,000 available for free streaming.

The DAHR provides the ability to research when songs were recorded, allowing us at GVR to curate music that was recorded in the year a listener is tuned to.

Many of the sounds heard in our productions are recorded by our production team.

GVR also finds many of its sounds and audio effects on FreeSound.org, a public online database of sounds all uploaded and available under Creative Commons licenses.

The BBC Sound Effects Archives is available for personal, educational or research purposes. There are over 33,000 clips from across the world from the past 100 years.