Below is a message from The Daily Californian’s archiving department
“Williams Refuses Demands; 700 Sleep in Sproul Hall”
“University Upholds Solicitation Ban as 3,000 Protesters Flood Plaza”
“During Sproul Showdown Students Ready for Arrest”
These are a few of the headlines published in The Daily Californian’s pages in 1964, the year of the Free Speech Movement. You can now view every newspaper printed that year in our newly launched digital archive: newsprint.dailycal.org.
We plan to digitize every Daily Cal issue, from the newspaper’s conception in 1871 to the present day. Every week, students are scanning page after page from microfilm reels at the campus library — a monotonous yet marvelous march through Berkeley’s past.
We’ve begun this painstaking process partly out of the belief that now, more than ever, our communities cannot do without open access to information. Our country is still reeling from a divisive election. We are all questioning where today’s headlines will stand within the larger course of history.
So, we urge you to support these efforts to digitize Berkeley’s paper of record. Donate $60 to sponsor one month’s issues or $600 to sponsor a year — or share our GoFundMe, where we hope to raise $6,000 by the end of 2016.
The funds go mostly toward paying students for their work. Beyond the task of digitizing every Daily Cal issue, we are also working to deploy technologies such as open-source optical character recognition that will make our archives searchable and taggable.
In doing so, we hope to serve as a resource to other student newspapers and organizations beginning the project of digitizing their own papers. We also hope to give the public the opportunity to engage with past stories like never before, allowing readers to explore how key issues were reported throughout the years and understand the historical Bay Area through the wealth of knowledge contained in our archives.
Please email [email protected] if you have any questions.
— Katy Abbott, Sahil Chinoy, Zoë Kleinfeld and Melissa Wen
