Delaware County Historical Societies's Newspapers and Preservation Network Again!



The Delaware County Republican Newspaper building in Chester

 

 

 

 

The Delaware County Historical Society has received the files of the Delaware County Chester Times at their museum in Chester. These files basically cover stories from the mid-1950's thru the mid 1990's. Before computers newspapers had librarians go thru the newspaper everyday and cut out important local news stories, about people, places etc. They were then placed in an envelope and filed by name or topic and placed in filing cabinets. This is what the historical society recently received these files are available at the museum and are worth the trip if you are doing research on these years.

  Older newspapers the society has are also available on cd. One of my pet projects for the last 4 years has been to scan the Delaware County Historical Societies' bound newspapers. This has been done thru the courtesy of the Friends Library at Swarthmore College who have given me access to their overhead scanner. Besides scanning the newspapers, they were OCR aka making them searchable. Most of the newspapers did not OCR well, but there were several exceptions, the best being the Morton Chronicle. The society has a complete run of the Morton Chronicle from 1880 thru 1940 complete. One of the other good things to come out of the scanning is several newspapers, the Chester News and the Issue, both Chester newspapers from the late 19th century have never been available before. They have never been placed on microfilm. Other newspapers in the same category are the Media Advertiser from the 1850's and the Delaware County Graphic, a Clifton Hghts. newspaper from the early 1900's. Another paper I have just started scanning is the Delaware County Morning Republican. This was one of the first newspapers to become a weekly paper in 1896. It is OCRing very well, aka very searchable. This paper has never been microfilmed and when done will be a great resource for researchers. So come down to the Delaware County Historical Societies' Museum and have a look.

 

I mentioned the Delaware County Historic Preservation Network in my last blog. If you are interested in finding out about talks, lectures, meetings please sign up below

Thanks!!

 

 

DCHPN Mailing List & Website:    The DCHPN Group at Yahoo Groups is a mailing list, web site and gathering place in cyberspace for historical societies, historic site managers and owners, historical commissions and HARB’s located in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.  We all have similar interests, similar goals, and similar problems in maintaining our sites and growing our organizations.  Through a mailing list and website, we can facilitate discussion among ourselves, ask for advice and share good ideas and success stories that may help other member organizations to have the same success.  To join, go here:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DCHPN/

 

DCHPN Facebook Page:  In this age of social media, you need to have multiple presences, and so we started a Facebook page for the group here:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dchpn/

 

Seminars on Topics of Mutual Interest:  DCHPN has held seminars on education programs in the community, fundraising, membership, and publicizing the Small Collections Initiative to review and index document collections of each participating group.  More are planned.