The Daily Universe celebrates 50 years
Rolls and rolls of microfilm line the shelves at the west end of the second floor of the Harold B. Lee Library. Each roll of microfilm contains hundreds of pages of old newspapers.
“Most historians studying any topic will go first of all to newspaper accounts of that time and that issue,” said Sherry Baker, professor of communications studies.
Newspapers are useful apart from other historical documents because they record what is happening at the moment, Baker said, whereas other documents take a longer view.
“There’s nothing else like it in terms of documenting current events, which, of course, become historical events over time,” she said.
Ed Adams, chair of the communications department, said no other archive records life on a daily basis. He said corporate reports, letters and correspondence do complete a picture of history, but they’re occasional whereas the newspaper is daily.
“It’s a daily snapshot,” he said. “Yes, it’s interpretive, but it’s a daily snapshot.”
He said at BYU, memos and other correspondence record events, but nothing else records the day-to-day life of the university like a newspaper.
“So the newspaper is a great chronicler of history because you can go back depending on the newspaper for hundreds of years and look at life everyday for a hundred years,” Adams said.
Adams said one event that helped show The Daily Universe’s initiative in recording history happened during the 2000 Bush-Gore election. After a night of the major television news organizations vacillating back and forth over who was the winner, the next morning the media were still fumbling over who was the declared winner of Florida and the election.
“The Daily Universe came out with a headline the next day: ‘No one wins,’” Adams said, in what he called a monumental editorial choice. “Where the national media fumbled all over the issue, The Daily Universe got it right on.”
He said that is an extreme example, but the role of The Daily Universe is a kind of a social chronicle of life on campus. He said the newspaper provides something for everyone, whether it is information on parking or housing or the challenges the university is facing.
“What’s interesting is it approaches everything — from the social, the political, the economic, the cultural, the athletic,” he said.
He said BYU’s four-volume history covers the administration, growth, clubs, organizations and academics.
“What it doesn’t capture real well is the social, cultural movement,” he said. “I would love to see the day where someone goes back and writes a history of where The Daily Universe or newspapers in general become a part of that and we’d get a better sense of the cultural and social history of our institution.”
Howard Bybee, HBLL Family History librarian, said newspapers are used in family history both to find articles about family members and to look at obituaries for birth, death or marriage dates.
Kip Sperry, associate director for the Center for Family History and Doctrine and a professor of church history and doctrine, said newspapers are a valuable primary source of information. Newspapers in America have been published as early as the late 17th century.
Sperry, who published a reference guide, “History Everywhere: North American Newspapers as a Source for Family and Local Historians,” said as people moved west, they frequently took a press with them, which recorded a local perspective. He said often newspaper clippings were included in probate records announcing the death and will of a citizen.
Besides the archives in the HBLL, newspaper records are available to BYU students and others through several resources. Ancestry.com contains a digital historical newspaper collection.
“Newspapers are nearly as old as history itself,” states Ancestry.com. “Though our modern image of the medium dates back to the Gutenberg Press (1440 A.D.), newsletters have existed since at least the second century. The Romans distributed political pamphlets called ‘acta,’ while newssheets appeared in China late in the Han Dynasty (around 200 A.D.).”
The federal government, through the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, has spearheaded an effort across the United States to catalog and preserve on microfilm U.S. newspapers published since the 1700s.
In April, the NEH and Library of Congress joined to create the National Digital Newspaper Program, which builds on the newspaper-microfilming program to develop an Internet database of U.S. newspapers.
“Newspapers are among the most important historical documents we have as Americans,” said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole in an April news release. “They tell us who we were, who we are and where we’re going. Students, historians, lawyers, politicians — even newspaper reporters — will be able to go to their computer at home or at work and through a few keystrokes, get immediate, unfiltered access to the greatest source of our history.”
Copyright Brigham Young University 15 Nov 2005
