You are correct, Fred, that the News struggled to sell the two recent football books, but I’d blame that more on its approach than anything else. In each case, the paper team with amateurish partners who didn’t know what they were doing in terms of selling the book. The first project, based around the 100th anniversary of the UM-OSU rivalry was very well done, but the man in charge of distribution was a local real estate agent (seriously) who never put together anything resembling a national or regional distribution deal.

It’s interesting to me that they’re severely limiting the library’s access to athletics-related content, because that’s where a ton of the interest has always been. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just give it all to the library but retain the commercial rights. My prediction is that this information will simply be lost, because Newhouse will eventually misplace it.

On the other hand, the sports archives have been extensively looted by former employees. We were often extremely disappointed when researching a project to find out how much stuff had been cut out and stolen, or was just completely missing. A real tragedy from a historical standpoint.

Although the U of M sports photos and news *sound* valuable, I remember seeing comments to the effect that the A2 news special football books, etc. were usually not very profitable.

So my question is whether it is likely that the digitization of the bound volumes will ever happen …

From what I observed during the 12 years that I worked at the A2 News, clips were made of all local articles, letters to the editor, opinion pieces, etc. – it was comprehensive, not a matter of someone’s judgment. Typically, multiple copies of the same article were filed. For example, if someone wrote an article about a local technology business, that article would be filed in at least three places: 1) the reporter’s byline file, 2) a file for the individual company, and 3) a general “local business” file. If it included an extensive interview with the company’s CEO, another copy would be placed in a file of articles that quoted or profiled him/her.

I completely agree about the benefit of having the paper in its entirety, for the context it provides. I too hope that the company follows through and actually digitizes the full run. The main difference between that and the library’s work, however, is that the library will provide free access to the material it digitizes. In contrast, it’s almost certain that the company will be looking to make money off of its digitization efforts, whatever those might be. Assuming that more newspapers will close in the coming years, let’s hope there are similar arrangements that keep at least some of the archives in the public domain, as is the case with this project.

Indeed. For example, in any version of The Ann Arbor News archives that stripped out the ads, you’d miss [this].

The clippings are nice, but those have been selected by someone as worthy of keeping, and that person may not share my views of what was important.

As much as I hate microfilm, one of the advantages is that you really feel like you’re back in the era of when the paper was originally published. You get to see the advertisements, the layout, everything.

The library will not be given permission to digitize full pages of the newspapers – the company plans to do that itself, eventually. The clipping files, which the library will be digitizing, contain articles that have been cut out of the newspaper and filed by category.

Or, could I input “Eberwhite School” and return a page of hits from articles mentioning the school over the last 50 years?

Will article text be fully searchable, or only headlines?

I suppose that there is a planning activity in progress, but I’d like to know a bit more about the vision for using these materials.

The archives are important to researchers and they are also important to retaining our history. I hope that the board stays on track to make this happen.