Searching local newspapers from the early days of Pipestone County recently became easier.
The Pipestone County Museum launched a digital newspaper archive in February that can be accessed through the museum’s website, at pipestonecountymuseum.com, at no cost to users. For now, the archive has all copies of all newspapers published in Pipestone County from 1879 to 1916. That includes 50,831 pages from 11 different newspapers.
All of those pages can be searched by word, such as the names of people, places, and events; by date; or by newspaper title, as in Pipestone County Star, which is the only local newspaper, out of 17 that have been published in the county, to be continually in print since 1879, according to the archive. The archive also has a clip tool that can be used to select a section of text from a newspaper and download or email it.
Museum Executive Director Susan Hoskins said the newspapers available in the archive now are just phase one of the project. Phase two will include newspapers from 1916 to 1939 and phase three will include newspapers from 1940 to around 1970. She’s hoping to upload phase two this year and the next phase the year after that. Hoskins said she planned to discuss the sharing of more modern newspaper editions with the publishers of the existing local newspapers.
The Pipestone County Historical Society (PCHS) had been looking into an online searchable newspaper archive for quite a while, Hoskins said, and started raising funds for the project about a year ago. Phase one cost $22,500, which was paid for with grants and donations.
Hoskins said the PCHS chose to work with Advantage Archives on the project because the company would provide the archive without a paywall. The museum sent the company microfilm versions of the newspapers late last year and the company created the digital versions of the newspapers that are now available in the archive.
So far, all the local newspapers that had added to the archive have been scanned from microfilm, but in some cases, Hoskins said, there are editions that are not available on microfilm. In those cases, Advantage Archives can scan bound copies of newspapers kept by the museum.
Advantage Archives provides similar archives for museums and libraries all over the United States, and even in other countries, which are searchable by clicking on the Directory link at the top of the archive search page. In addition to newspapers, Hoskins said some of the organizations have included books in their archives.
Hoskins said the benefit of the digital newspaper archive is that it makes newspapers more easily available, which is one of the PCHS’s goals. Before the archive was created, people had to go to the museum to look through the old newspapers. Now, they can look at them whenever and wherever they like.
“We don’t want to be gatekeepers of history,” Hoskins said. “We want to be enablers for people.”
In addition to making the newspapers more easily accessible and searchable, the digitization also creates another copy of them and helps preserve the original copies, the oldest of which are deteriorating and becoming brittle. Hoskins said microfilm also helped preserve the newspapers, but is not as easily accessible.
The newspaper archive joins other online options to view portions of the museum’s collection, including a searchable collections database that started last year and photographs and documents that the museum has shared through the Minnesota Digital Library.
“We’re trying to put more in the hands of the public because that’s why we have it here,” Hoskins said. “We’ve preserved it for the public.”