Articles | Archiving Newspapers: Orchestrating a Blast from the Past

A smart fourth-grader's interest in history was fired up by his grandpa's efforts during the latter's military career. The boy thought that history books are boring because they were always written in the past tense. He would always mention that nothing beats grandpa's war escapades since his old man narrates stories as if the stories happened just yesterday or the other day. The boy's dad, however, beat grandpa's best when he brought the boy to the city library's newspaper archives. The boy read through the pages of digitized text and images with eyes opened extra-ordinarily wide with excitement and delight.

The next day, it was the boy's turn to efforts his experience with the newspaper archives. From thereon, grandpa ceased having the monopoly of their story telling afternoons at the porch. Every time grandpa mentioned about Scud and Patriot missiles, the young boy volunteers a description of how these mighty weapons of war looked like. As expected, the boy showed excellent performance in school in his history and social studies classes. The boy who expressed disinterest in history books attained higher ratings in reading because his experience with the newspaper archives encouraged him to read a lot.

In no time, the boy was already an avid reader and it reflected on his grade in reading. As revealed from the boy's experiences, one of the greatest uses of newspaper archives is in the academe. Teachers can prepare a video presentation of a past news story from archived collections. Teachers can even plan a visit to such archives as part of an academic tour to spark their student's awareness about lessons in science, history, or social studies. By orchestrating a blast from the past, teachers can stimulate students to answer their homework or prepare a project based on a short walk down memory lane courtesy of archived news media or other historical documents.

Roughly, at least 60 million pages of newspapers all over the United States have been microfilmed. The numbers exhibit a determined attempt on the part of the government to microfilm newspapers in all states under the project dubbed as National Endowment for the Humanities in close coordination with the Library of Congress. No doubt, the preservation of history in the making is a sacred task to offer our coming generations with facts of today's existence. We owe this to the future, as our forefathers owe it to us - the gift of history.

Surely, preservation of newspapers in archived form will be a heritage of the present for the future. It has already been proven, though, that in the course of modern history, newspaper archives play various roles to address the needs of the same generation which labored to undertake archiving, mostly along the aspect of education or information management. Students from all levels of education stand to benefit from newspaper archives. Hence, the founding of commercial services for archiving every valuable piece of information for posterity's sake is a welcome development.

Rhetoric aside, the field of education needs a blast from the past to preserve the legacy of knowledge today and into the future. Archiving newspapers is a gracious endeavor. Man should unwaveringly support every effort to archive newspapers and related media.