Too Late Now: Libraries’ Intertwined Challenges of Newspaper Morgues, Microfilm, and Digitization

Abstract

Many major newspapers once produced and distributed different editions of a newspaper for different markets on the same day. This publication arrangement lasted for about a century, from the Gilded Age of the 1880s until business consolidation happened in the news industry during the 1970s and 1980s.¹ The contents of the editions of the same newspaper could vary widely. The existence (and disappearance) of simultaneous newspaper editions represents one of the greatest documentary challenges facing present and coming generations of genealogists, local communities, and social historians. This article provides an argument to pay attention to three interrelated issues facing librarians . . .