Friday, October 17, 2014

Brown Daily Herald's digitization project

I learned a few years ago that the Brown Daily Herald had digitized its campus newspaper at least back to the period that most interested me - the late 60s and early 70s. For many young protesters of the Vietnam War the spirit of the 60s ended in 1972 with George McGovern humiliating defeat by our arch-villain president, Richard Nixon.
The digitized archives of the Brown Daily Herald took me back to the day Fred Halstead, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, was invited to the campus to talk radical politics to a very receptive- if not yet socialist- student audience 
Recently there was a plea for more funding to continue the Brown Daily Herald's digitization project. Its goal is full access to the newspaper archives from 1891 forward. They need to raise $100,000 "to ensure these documents survive for posterity."
Past issues of The Herald are "a valuable but frequently untapped resource for journalists, historians and others ..." I do think that such a useful project should get federal support.  And should not long time Providence Journal readers be interested in a similar digitization project for this historical newspaper?
I learned that your retired old pro columnist, M. Charles Bakst, was on the staff of the Brown Daily Herald. I doubt if Charles was ever a flaming Trotskyist. But old archives reveal surprising truths.

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Ron