Editorial: The Daily Campus archive to be digitized by the Dodd Center

Ever since May of 1896, our university has had its own student newspaper to inform students and the university community about information relevant to their lives. Sure, its name changed through the years: from The Storrs Agricultural College Lookout, to the Connecticut Agricultural College Lookout, to The Lookout, to The Connecticut Campus and Lookout, to The Connecticut Campus in 1914, to the Connecticut Daily Campus and finally to its current title the Daily Campus in 1984. But some things never changed: its commitment to quality news reporting and its dedication to important events from the students’ perspective.

Now the on-campus Dodd Center, which has long maintained a print archive of the newspaper, has announced this week a plan to convert its microfilm and print copies to digital ones. With the Internet and other technological media allowing widespread viewing of these documents, the university community and anybody else interested can view and read the historical record of UConn, dating back over a century. There are several advantages such as no physical wear-and-tear or decaying that could limit the visibility or heighten the fragility of the issues as print copies could. There is also the ability to search within the issues can bring up the desired results – a particular article or year, for instance – almost instantly.

In recent years, other college newspapers have undertaken similar endeavors. The Yale Daily News has digitized its archive going back to January 1878. The Brown Daily Herald has also digitized most of its issues going back to 1893, including a fun “Today in the Archive” feature spotlighting a different notable issue every day. Boston College has also recently started a digitizing project going back to November 1919.

The Dodd Center aims to complete its digitization through 1990 in under a year, by the end of the next summer. Currently, the first decade of 1896 through 1906 have already been digitized, and can be viewed. Eventually, the Web address will host the entirety of the Daily Campus archive collection for anybody to view. When it does, we urge you to take a look – whether to find articles from a particularly important moment or date in history, to read the very first issue to see how much the university has changed or just to browse and discover for yourself the history of one of the University of Connecticut’s most enduring institutions.