The CHNC began as a joint endeavor of the Colorado State Library, History Colorado, and the Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP). The CHNC was started with two grants awarded to the CDP totaling $370,000 — a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant provided by the Colorado State Library and an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant. These grants provided funding to license the software, purchase the hardware that hosts the newspaper images, and to digitize around 97,000 pages of newspapers. These grants concluded September 30, 2005.
On-going support for maintaining, developing, and providing access to the CHNC is paid for with state and federal funds administered by the Colorado State Library. The long-term goal for the CHNC is to provide digital access to all newspapers published in Colorado between 1859 and 1923, the time period for which publications are in the public domain and without copyright restrictions. Over 3 million pages from Colorado newspapers from this time period are available for digitization and so many more from the titles and years that follow. At 2,000,000 + pages currently included, we have just scratched the surface.