The Carnivorous Plant Newsletter is a publication venue for new Latin plant descriptions. It is important that species descriptions in CPN be available soon after publication to a wider audience than only ICPS members. Furthermore, because of the work of Jan Schlauer, the ICPS was selected as the International Registration Authority for carnivorous plant cultivar names. This made it even more important that select articles appearing in Carnivorous Plant Newsletter be made widely available. Initially, to make the information available, HTML versions of the printed species and cultivar descriptions were posted on the ICPS website.

In 2000, Carl Mazur started a CPN scanning project. It took a while to figure out how how best to do the scanning and what the end result would be. In 2004 David Conner scanned most of the 4000 pages to images and sent them on CD to Carl. By the end of 2006, Carl had completed the tedious task of cropping the page images and converting sets of images from David to full issue PDFs.

Carl passed the job of completing the project to Bob Ziemer in September 2006. Some of the pages needed to be reprocessed and several volumes still needed to be scanned. Bob and David Conner reviewed each of the pages and replaced those that were found to be defective. Please note that the quality of the scanned images may vary, but we strived for the best quality that we could achieve given the amount of work, time, and availability of quality hard copies of the back issues.

By the end of December 2006, the project was completed and CPN volumes 1 (April 1972) through 35 (December 2006) were written in PDF format to CD for distribution to members. That CD, now a DVD because of size, is updated every year after the release of the December issue. Copies of the current DVD are for sale to members on our Members Only website. Issue PDFs are also at the Members Only website and available for free download to all current members.

In parallel to the scanning project, John Brittnacher coordinated a project to produce an on-line index of all CPN articles. Tim Topoleski kick-started the project by providing a spreadsheet with most of the index information for CPN volumes 1 through 17 (1972-1988). Barry Rice provided the indexing scheme he used as Editor of CPN. John created a MySQL database and associated web pages to manage the index and to search and display article information. Mike Wilder did data entry for about 3 years until Bob Ziemer took over the task. Bob created PDFs of individual articles so they could be made available on this website. Some of the PDFs are embargoed for a few months as an incentive to becoming a member.