Boise, Idaho News, Weather and Traffic - KTRV Fox 12 - Newspapers spanning 130 years donated to school
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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The parent company of The Salt Lake Tribune is donating editions of the paper from 1871 to 2003 to the University of Utah, which will conserve the fragile volumes and keep them available for public access.
The university also plans to digitize the pages to create a searchable database.
The Salt Lake Tribune has bound past editions of the paper into more than 2,500 oversized volumes. This month MediaNews Group made a donation transferring ownership to the university.
Ken Sanders, a Salt Lake City bookseller, appraised the collection and values it at $650,000.
"The donation is huge. It's 130 years of continuous newspaper publication in the West," Sanders said. "What is such a thing worth historically? It's priceless."
The gift features 100,000 issues, including the Tribune andincomplete runs of past publications like the Junior Tribune, Salt Lake Telegram, Salt Lake Herald, Salt Lake Times, Salt Lake Democrat and Intermountain Republic.
"We are pleased to contribute our historic newspapers to this fine university, and through them to the people of the great state of Utah," said William Dean Singleton, chief executive of newspaper publisher MediaNews Group Inc. "It's been said that newspapers are the first draft of history so it is fitting they be kept in the U.'s library, where they can be accessed by interested citizens and researchers as well."
Singleton is also chairman of the board of The Associated Press.
The volumes had been in the Tribune's basement for decades. But the newspaper moved locations and last year the new humidity-controlled storage space was getting ready to open as part of a renovation of the university's Marriott Library. Special collections managers and Tribune executives agreed to have the books moved to the library.
The university is undertaking a newspaper digitization project that involves plans to scan 8 million pages from 50 Utah newspapers, including the Tribune's entire run.
"We've been at this since 2002. We've processed 700,000 pages. That's 10 percent in seven years. We have a ways to go," said John Herbert, head of digital technologies at the library.
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On the Net:
http://www.digitalnewspapers.org.
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Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
