Friday, September 8, 2017

CM Life Issues 1999-2016 Added to Digital Repository



The student newspaper CM Life and its predecessors have been a part of the CMU campus since 1919. Recently additional issues have been brought online in Clarke Historical Library's digital repository, expanding the run up through June, 2016. The preservation microfilming unit of Clarke first brought issues online back in 2013 including Central Normal Life (1919-1927), Central State Life (1927-41), and Central Michigan Life (1941-98). This was accomplished by taking microfilmed issues of the newspapers through the scanning process in order to digitize them. Now you can find all of the digitized issues available via the CMU Digital Collections.

Whether you do a single search that covers the entire run or zero in on a time period, each issue appears as an individual PDF file which presents the newspaper exactly as published. Issues can be searched individually too.  Additionally, the page content pane displays plain text, which aids researchers with transcriptions.

The student newspaper project was the first newspaper digitization project undertaken by the Clarke. Since the original project in 2013, upgraded software provides an improved user experience to CMU digital collections which include Digital Michigan Newspapers, the Digital Michigan Newspaper Portal, CMU History, CMU Scholarly & Creative Works, Clarke Digital Collections, and the Historical Soo Locks Images. By hosting the newspaper collection, Clarke qualified for participation in the National Digital Newspaper Project, a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

With 1,714 newly added issues including 14,700 pages, CMU's recent past is a near as your keyboard.