By Dan Linke

Earlier this year, Jean Hendry *80, former chair of the Princetoniana Committee, visited Mudd Library to review the Daily Princetonian’s general records, where she found something very special. Lo and behold, within box 2, a folder marked “Special Issues” contained four previously thought lost issues, including Volume 1, Issue #1 from 1876. These four issues have been digitized and are now available online.  

In 2009, the University Archives initiated a digitization project to put the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, online back to its first issue in 1876. At that time, only the Harvard newspaper was entirely online, but just its text, and it was delivered using the same style formatting as the contemporary newspaper. The Princeton project aimed to do better by photographing the newspaper pages and making them keyword searchable, but with the results being delivered as images of the actual newspaper. Now over two dozen college newspapers use this system, including Cornell, Columbia, Penn, and Yale.

When we completed the initial Daily Princetonian digitization project in 2011, about 20,000 issues were available, an impressive number, except that the first and second issue were not among them. The run started with issue #3. Despite searching the multiple runs within the Mudd Manuscript Library and the offices of the Prince, they could not be located. But just like the advice given Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz, we should have looked in our own backyard.

This fall we updated the Papers of Princeton website to have more information about the origins of the project, its various donors and supporters, and information about the publications themselves. Also, two publications, The Nassau Weekly and Business Today were added, joining the recently digitized US 1, bringing the total number of publications available to 17. Each addition to the site makes the overall site more valuable, as more coverage provides more perspectives, and the chance to recover multiple voices from Princeton’s past.

We will continue to add publications to the site as resources and time allow, and given Princeton’s rich student publishing history, this work will be ongoing for some time to come.