Past and Future of Newspaper
Preservation
Kevin Driedger
Library of Michigan
Michigan Newspapers
Michigan Newspaper Project
• Funded by NEH, organized by LC
• Mission to locate, catalog, and microfilm Michigan’s newspaper heritage
• Planning and cataloging at LM, filming at CMU
A locating, bibliographic, and preservation NIGHTMARE
• A few large collections, and lots and lots and lots of small collections throughout state.
• A publishing history of mergers, editions, name changes, and multitudes of inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies.
• Old newspapers – large, brittle, heavy, filthy, and microfilm’s fun too.
MNP newspaper statistics
• Located ~ 4000 newspaper titles (as defined by cataloging rules)
• 527 different communities
Top 5 counties571 - Wayne186 - Kent160 - Washtenaw143 - Oakland141 - Ingham
Bottom 5 counties5 - Lake4 - Crawford4 - Luce4 - Kalkaska3 - Alcona
17 Languages
Arabic, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Maltese, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish
Microfilming
• Board of “experts” selected titles for microfilming
• Filming done to standards!
• ~ 100 titles from 51 cities in 33 counties in 7 languages
• or 740,472 pages.
• 1 copy at CMU, 1 copy at owning library, 2 copies at LM
Products of MNP
Newspaper preservation today
• Some microfilming still happening – but few funds available
• Lot of interest in digitization – but, is it preservation, and is it economically viable (yet)?
• Do we just wait for Google to do it?
Newspaper Preservation Tomorrow
• What’s a newspaper?• Will there be any “thing” to
preserve• Can we rely on publishers to
keep an archive?• How can cultural institutions
preserve local history, without journalism / publishing around to document it?
http://blog.pressdisplay.com/2007/07/23/pressdisplay-meets-iphone-news-junkies-rejoice/
Kevin Driedger
Library of Michigan
702 W. Kalamazoo
Lansing, MI 48910
517-373-9440