An archive of digitized print media from around the world — including major dailies, special interest newsletters, and government agency papers — is making research easier and more efficient for scholars and historians, according to interim head of Research Services Geoff Morse.
The NewsBank/Readex collections, donated to the Libraries by NewsBank president and CEO Dan Jones ’61, collect digitized microform from more than 2,000 newspapers, business journals, and other periodicals, putting hard-to-access physical materials within reach of any Northwestern faculty member or student with a computer and Internet access.
“Primary and secondary sources like newspapers are a huge treasure trove for some researchers,” Morse said. “For some, the ability to access them from a computer is a game changer.”
For years, the process of researching newspaper archives was cumbersome, slow and inefficient, Morse said. Such archives were often only available while sitting at a microfilm reader, scrolling and skimming one page at a time. And if the local library did not have the particular newspaper microfilms on file — and given the massive proliferation of American newspapers across history, this could easily be the case — then those films would have to borrowed from a library elsewhere in the world, a process that could add weeks to the research.
“People never had time to read 20 years of microfilm,” Morse said. “Now you can do so much from your own desk, searching even regional papers with keywords in an instant.”
While newspapers are clearly a source of first-hand reportage about events throughout history, they often contain information that goes beyond daily news events; a paper may contain detailed local election returns, legal proceedings, prices of commodities, shipping news, and family information like birth, marriage, and death announcements. The collection also includes an important cross-section of materials that reveal the history of demographic groups, time periods and regions, whether through major dailies (like the Chicago Sun-Times and even the Daily Northwestern); African American and Hispanic newspapers; or FBI translations of foreign newscasts.
Between Libraries purchases and NewsBank donations, the number of papers and sources in the collection has been growing steadily over the last decade, Morse said. Usage rises each year as more and more scholars discover the ease of accessing history from an office desk instead of a library microfilm reader. Now when he helps researchers find materials that have precisely the information they sought, Morse thinks, “I’m not sure we would have found this before.”