For history buffs, it’s getting easier to access historic Indiana newspapers to learn about the state and Michiana region’s past.
That’s because of Hoosier State Chronicles, a website operated by the Indiana State Library that provides free, searchable access to more than 30 historic Indiana newspapers. The papers cover more than 80 years of news, with publication dates ranging from 1840 to 1922.
Visit the website at: newspapers.library.in.gov.
Want to see the front-page headline when the armistice was declared for the Great War (World War I)?
”President proclaims terms of surrender: Congress learns war is over,” declared a huge headline in an “extra” edition of the South Bend News-Times published on Nov. 11, 1918, the day the armistice was declared.A front-page article describes people celebrating in the streets in South Bend, an impromptu parade and factories closing for the day.
Digital versions of the South Bend News-Times from 1913 through 1921 recently were added to the Hoosier State Chronicles database. Those years include news coverage of such events as the transfer in 1913 of some Studebaker Corp. auto production from a plant in Plymouth, Mich., to South Bend; Prohibition starting in Indiana in April 1918; and the 1920 death and funeral of Notre Dame football star George Gipp.
The News-Times ceased publication in 1938.
With this technology, a computer user can view the actual pages, photos and headlines in a paper, zoom in to read specific articles and “turn” the pages to read a full edition. A user also can search the database for specific names, dates and events.
In most cases, the newspapers are digitized by scanning them from microfilm, said Chandler Lighty, program manager for the digital newspaper project at the Indiana State Library.The project started in 2011 with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and has received more grants since then.
”As long as we have funding and the resources to keep digitizing, we’ll keep doing it,” Lighty said.
The library chooses which newspapers to digitize based on which are available on quality microfilm and not subject to copyright restrictions. The library has an advisory board of historians and archivists from across Indiana to help decide priorities for digitizing.
The database contains digitized versions of many newspapers from Marshall County, including the Marshall County Democrat, Marshall County Republican, Marshall County Independent, Plymouth Banner and Plymouth Journal, among others.
Marshall County had many highly partisan newspapers, particularly in the Civil War era, providing diverse news coverage of that area, Lighty said.
If Indiana residents have paper copies of historic newspapers that have never been microfilmed or otherwise copied, Lighty encourages them to donate the papers to the Indiana State Library.
Microfilm copies of the South Bend Tribuneback to its founding in 1872 may be viewed atthe St. Joseph County and Mishawaka-Penn-Harris public libraries, although the content isn’t searchable by names or words. Many other former local newspapers also are available on microfilm at the public libraries.
South Bend Tribune articles from 1994 to the present are included in a digital archive and may be accessed (for a fee) at: www.southbendtribune.com/newsbank. Recent articles are available on The Tribune’s website at www.southbendtribune.com.
The St. Joseph County Public Library is preparing to digitize The Reformer, a newspaper that reported on South Bend’s black community and published from 1967 to 1971. Once the project is complete, the digital searchable version of the newspaper will be available freeonline through the county library’s “Michiana Memory” local history database (michianamemory.sjcpl.org) and also throughIndiana University South Bend’s Civil Rights Heritage Center.
The project is being funded by a$10,000 grant from the Indiana State Library that will pay for digitizing the newspaper, as well as other documents and photos related to the community’s black history.The county library owns what is believed to be the only extensive collection of original editions of The Reformer, said Joe Sipocz, manager of the library’s Local & Family History Department.
The Reformer chronicled many events in South Bend during the civil rights movement.Scanning of the paper is being handled by an outside firm.
The University of Notre Dame Archives provides free online access to searchable digital versions of several publications: The Observer, the campus newspaper, from 1984 to 2003; Scholastic newsmagazine, from 1867 to 2011; and several other early campus publications. See:archives.nd.edu/search/specialized.htm.
Notre Dame also is involved in a partnership to create digitized, searchable versions of Catholic diocese newspapers from across the country. It’s called the Catholic Newspaper Project.
The effort so far is focusing on large dioceses, including New York and Chicago, said Patricia Lawton, a Notre Dame digital projects librarian who is working on the project. Eventually it is hoped the effort will expand to religious newspapers of smaller dioceses, including the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, she said.
Michigan also has a newspaper digitizing program. For a complete list of historic Michigan newspapers that are available on line (some for free and some for a fee) see: libforms.cmich.edu/condor/newspaper_portal.php.
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Digital versions of many historic Indiana newspapers are now accessible free online, including the South Bend News-Times from 1913 to 1921, which is available on the Hoosier State Chronicles webpage.
Source: Indiana State Library
