Brief by Central Staff
History – October 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
The historian’s (or genealogist’s) task of poring through old newspapers can be easier now, thanks to the Colorado Digitization Project and its partners, the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Historical Society.
The 1859-1923 editions of about 75 newspapers from 20 Colorado towns and cities have been scanned from microfilm archives (so you can see what they look like) and digitized (so that computers can find the words for your searches), and they’re available on-line at www.cdpheritage.org/newspapers.
Although many of the publications expired years ago, the San Luis Valley is pretty well represented: Alamosa Journal, Creede Candle, Antonito La Voz del Valle, and Saguache Chronicle. Other historic area papers include the Lake City Silver World and the White Pine Cone.
As you may have noticed, there aren’t any from Leadville, Granite, Buena Vista, St. Elmo, Salida, or Fairplay. The main reason for that is money; it costs about $1 a page, and although the digitizers have some grant money, they’re quite happy to accept private donations.
At a presentation in Salida earlier this year, it was estimated that it would cost $26,750 to digitize the early years of the Mountain Mail and Salida Mail.
The archive stops at 1923, because everything before that date has gone out of copyright and is now in the public domain, thus eliminating the need to find the owner of the publishing rights and get permission. That cut-off date will advance in future years.
We checked the website. Despite the warning that it “is best viewed using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x (or higher),” we got it to work acceptably with Opera 7.54 running on SuSE Linux 9.1; we were able to browse through old papers, search for words (“silver” appears 2,120 times in the White Pine Cone), and otherwise enjoy the website.
As far as we know, Colorado Central is the only regional publication that keeps a full archive on its website (www.coloradocentralmagazine.com), but we also note that our archives go back only to 1994, rather than 1879.
If you want to donate to the Colorado Digitization Project, contact Brenda Bailey-Hainer, Colorado’s Historical Newspaper Collection Project Manager, at 303-866-6907.
