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Greetings,
I'm a strong believer in the value of local news - not only for current news, but for our archives as well.
We've recently upgraded our Newsbank digital newspaper collection. This means that you can now get free access to the Monterey Herald daily newspaper with your library card! These are full text articles from 2002-present, and the full image daily papers from 2023-present. No paywall, just a library card wall!
Many people are aware of our existing digital newspapers that cover 1849 - 1964, but these will be expanding in the coming weeks as well. Thanks to the support for licensing digitl access from the Monterey Herald and the Monterey County Weekly, we'll be expanding access to issues from 1964 - 2001 of the Monterey Herald (788 rolls of microfilm!) as well as digitizing print copies of Coasting, Coast Weekly, and Monterey County Weekly starting from 1988. I truly appreciate the support of Dave Kellogg from the Monterey Herald and Bradley Zeve from Monterey County Weekly for their support. Without their support for this project, we would not have been able to work on making the content free and accessible to our public.
So why is this such an intriguing project to me? Well, we often get requests for a news article or obituary. A person might say "Can you look up an article for me? It was sometime in May or June of 1986." Think about this for a second...each page of a newspaper on microfilm is like reading a page of search results. But in this case, you have dozens of pages of each paper (much thicker in past years btw) and a paper for every day of the week. By scanning the pages with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) you'll be able to search the entire 1849-2002 microfilm by your search term, rather than page by page. For years, libraries and journalists kept clipping files of newspapers to refer back to them. The digital scan of the early microfilm, and digital newsbank allows rapid access to information with modern tools. Look for these updates by the end of summer, but meanwhile, the microfilm and backstock of print items will be out of the library.
Contrary to popular belief, not everything has been digitized yet - and information that you share or receive is only as good as the information you have access to.
Funding for this project comes from generous donations to our electronic resources and California History Room. One of my drivers here is "what makes Monterey Library unique?" and local stories drive that. By investing in securing and saving our local news, I believe that we create a stronger Monterey Public Library. Invest in local news and support access to a well informed public! I've written this before, but the early tagline of the Californian were:
"The Liberty of the Press, consists of the right to publish the TRUTH, with good motives and justifiable ends - Alexander Hamilton."
Warmly,
Brian
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