A Catholic College Newspaper as a Research Instrument in an Oral History Project

Abstract

A student produced and edited newspaper is necessarily a grassroots production, with an allvolunteer staff. Student produced newspapers can be a potential source of primary, historical information about student life on a college campus, providing useful insight and data about students' perspectives and experiences while attending college. However a central problem of the print copies and printed or microfilmed back-files of these types of collections is the limited means for discovering data, and devising the best means in which to describe the contents. Saint Leo University is a Catholic University in the Southern United States, originally founded by Benedictine monks in 1889. It became a two year college in 1965, and the student newspaper printed its first column in 1967. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of social change in America and in the Catholic Church, which did not leave this community of faith unmoved nor unchanged. The role which the newspaper played during this time was unique, providing a voice for the students, faculty, and other community members, which assisted in informing its audience of events and issues while nurturing a faith-based community. The recently digitized collection of this newspaper preserves and makes available an exceptional collection of voices and perspectives from an earlier time in this institution's history. This paper will discuss the digitized collection, its search features, and as it's potential as a historical research tool in an institutional oral history project, as well as the intersection of information and religious perspectives made available for examination. campus buildings and other student protests on campus (Columbia Spectator, 2011). Research on newspapers of this era has heretofore been tedious, difficult and painstakingly slow; most campus newspapers have never been indexed; and the majority of the archival materials have been available only in print, and only in person. However, initiatives to digitize the treasure trove of primary source information have been gaining momentum, with some projects discussed at national and state conferences from 2003 onward; grants, institutional projects, and grassroots efforts are making a small portion of these repositories digitally available for research. Some of the more visible projects and organizations in this field are Google, Ohio College Library Center (OCLC), and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), but there are other companies and non-profits, as well as individual institutional efforts underway as well. For example, since 2009, ArcaSearch has digitized 1,100 newspapers (some of which are college newspapers) "to capture and present a community's history in an easy and accessible web-based digital format" (ArcaSearch, 2012), while Lyrasis has provided grants for newspaper digitization projects. Costs for a digitization project can vary widely, depending on the number of pages that need to be scanned, the comprehensiveness of the indexing, and how much of the project is kept in ...