Get an attitude when searching newspapers online, Patsy Luebbert, grant manager of the State Historical Society of Missouri, challenged a group meeting recently at the Poplar Bluff Municipal Library.
Luebbert was in town talking about the partnership between the local library and the State Historical Society of Missouri to put online more than 60 years of local newspapers dating back to 1878.
Luebbert explained, 98 of Missouri’s 114 counties and the City of St. Louis newspapers have some digital contents to some time in the 1960s. At times, the digitizing projects may seem to be slow to work, but the long range goal is to complete the project through 1960s.
“You have to have a dream,” Luebbert said.
Luebbert has served as administrator of the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project since 2010, previously working for 35 years at the Missouri State Archives. She was invited to share information locally by the The Butler County Genealogical Society and the library staff who hosted the Genealogy Society’s recent meeting.
The Butler County publications being made digital during this first phase are The Poplar Bluff Citizen, 1878-1907; the Poplar Bluff Republican, 1915-1944; and the Weekly Citizen Democrat, 1908-1943.
Preserving history of local communities
In 1898-99, the Missouri Press Association wanted an institution to collect and preserve Missouri’s newspapers and they turned to the State Historical Society of Missouri which was founded in 1898, Luebbert said.
“Collecting and preserving newspapers is not an easy job since they are printed on a cheap paper, which is not designed to last hundreds of years,” she said.
In early newspapers there were very few headlines and pages varied from four to ten columns, Luebbert said. Today’s newspapers are more uniform.
In the 1930s, microfilming was made available and “microfilm is still the best way to preserve newspapers,” she said.
To ensure America’s historical newspapers will be available for its citizens, the National Endowment for the Humanities conducted from 1982 to 2011 the United States Newspaper Program. USNP was a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. With NEH funding and technical assistance from the Library of Congress, all state projects were successfully completed.
During the 21st century, digitizing newspapers became easier when the Library of Congress joined in the efforts and chose to do the project telling how to properly digitize the papers in the Chronicling America grant project.
Luebbert said, State Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant funds were used to digitize newspapers since 2010-2011. The grants were used to digitize 150,000 plus pages of Civil War Era newspapers for 1854-1876 through reconstruction. Currently, LSTA grants have funded digitalizing 2.3 million pages from 300 unique titles.
According to the State Historical Society of Missouri’s website, the group has a growing collection of digitized historic newspapers. These images are freely available to the public and are keyword-searchable. Many of them are also available through the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site, which ultimately aims to include newspaper pages from all states and U.S. territories in its collection.
Search tips
When researching online, think outside the box and use the language of the time, Luebbert said. An example she gave was if someone is searching for an article about a bank robbery in the 1800s, use the word ‘heist’ instead of ‘robbery.’
Demonstrating how to view and use the digital papers once they are available, Luebbert used a PowerPoint featuring the Library of Congress website. She displayed going to a digital version of the Wheaton Journal newspaper and typing in train accident. She got so many results, she decided to sort by date.
Online resources
by county
The society also has more than 56,000 reels of newspapers on microfilm available to researchers. Titles can be browsed by county or town. One of the most valuable finding aids in the society is often overlooked. Available online, an index to selected Missouri newspapers contains entries can lead a researcher to lengthy articles or short mentions of many topics in Missouri history.
Use this tool to search for article citations from the Index to Selected Missouri Newspapers. Researchers can find information about people and topics throughout Missouri.
To request articles from the index, copy and paste the citation information into the Research Request form. Please limit your request to ten citations.
A growing collection of digitized historic newspapers is available online through the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project.
For researchers who would like to complete research remotely, interlibrary and direct loan services are available for microfilm. You can also submit a request for research services and a research center staff member will assist with the research for a fee.