Free! Historical & Interesting Events in Library History Found In Digitized Newspapers
This post fits in numerous categories including worth a look, interesting, educational, informative, and even fun.
Yesterday, a new issue of Retroview arrived in our inbox. It's a free e-mail newsletter, published quarterly, about the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Collection.
Yes, of course, it's a promo/ad piece but that's not an issue for us in this situation. Why? Aside from what you would expect in a promotional newsletter, each issue focuses on a single topic and contains a couple of articles or "historic" advertisements that highlight content from the collection. They're usually interesting, often worth sharing, and sometimes even fun. To access an article, just click a link and the article arrives as a PDF file.
The first summary offers direct links to three historic articles about the ALA including one from 1876 New York Times about a convention in Philadelphia where the American Library Association was formed. Another article from the Detroit Free Press reports on nearly 6,000 people attending the 1922 ALA annual conference in Detroit. You'll can also read a note with greeting to the conventioneers from Adam Strohm, a librarian at the Detroit Public Library.
The second summary contains links to four articles about library and info technology. The first article from the Baltimore Sun is about the ALA Library 21 exhibit at the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle. Another article from the Los Angeles Times discusses computer networking as demonstrated at the 1964 Worlds Fair in NYC. Specifically, a UNIVAC computer (hello punch cards!) at the Los Angeles Public Library was being connected directly with a computer at the NY World's Fair to create the "first remote electronic reference library." It goes on to say that content for the UNIVAC 490 Real-Time Computer (it's official name) comes from Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Abridged Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Two more articles are linked. A 1962 Baltimore Sun article titled "Library Without Books" and another from an August, 1964 issue of The Los Angeles Times, "Computer Age Nears For School Libraries."
We think it's worth noting that that "older issues" of Retroview contain only one or two promos for ProQuest products. For example, here's an issue with five brief articles and pictures offering ideas about curing the hiccups. To receive the text or image as a PDF, just click on the the text/image in the newsletter. It's straight content except at the bottom of the page where a phone number, e-mail address, and link are provided if you to tryout the Historic Newspaper databases.
To access past issues we simply went to the ProQuest website and searched for "Retroview." From the looks of it, there are about 20-25 issues available.
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