By Roy Ockert Jr.
As mentioned in Sunday’s editorial column by Editor Chris Wessel, the Craighead County Historical Society is making an effort to preserve historical materials that the Sun staff will not have room for after the move to smaller headquarters this month. The Sun building has been sold to St. Bernards Healthcare and will be renovated for other purposes.
The most space-consuming of these historical materials are some 450 bound volumes of The Sun that date back to the 1930s. In the years before microfilm, microfiche and digital methods of preservation, newspaper companies had their editions bound inside cloth-covered heavy cardboard covers.
That allowed newspaper staff members, researchers, scholars and other citizens to search for articles, photos and advertisements that had been published previously. At the various newspapers where I toiled during my career, I spent many hours flipping through the pages of bound volumes.
As Chris said, unless you had an idea when something was published, the search could be difficult and time-consuming. And yet those newspaper pages formed the history of a given community that could be found nowhere else.
In size the cover of a bound volume had to be just a little larger than the newspaper page, which generally was a lot larger than today. When, for example, The Sun remade its edition of Nov. 22, 1963, with news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, its page size was 16 by 23.5 inches. Today it’s 10.5 by 21.
The thickness of each bound volume depended on the frequency of publication and the number of pages per edition. In its heyday each bound volume could contain only a month’s worth of edition, and that’s a big, heavy book. In earlier years you could get six months or even a year per book.
When microfilm came along, many newspaper companies, including The Sun, contracted with vendors to photograph each page of those bound volumes, producing long rolls of film that could be fed into microfilm readers.
Those were a little easier to search, but not by much. One advantage was that some readers could also print parts of a page.
Another advantage microfilm had over a bound volume is that the paper on which newspapers are printed — for speed and mass consumption — deteriorates rapidly. Just turning pages in some of The Sun’s older volumes can cause tears. Microfilm lasts much longer if maintained properly.
After I became editor of The Sun in 2001, I learned that most of its bound volumes were in a storage unit that wasn’t climate controlled, apparently a concession that microfilm had rendered them dispensable. By then we also had the technological ability to archive stories digitally, so that one could search the files easily by word or phrase. Soon we expanded the digital archiving to include full editions, though much of that could not be available to the public through our Web site.
Nevertheless, I believe the old bound volumes still have historical value. Just as many readers will tell you that today they like the feel of a newspaper in hand over reading one on a computer or tablet, there is something better about seeing the actual pages. Further, microfilming from a bound volume was far from perfect; you tended to lose parts of the inside columns.
Once we started the full-page digitizing, we stopped microfilming. Instead of providing reels of film to area libraries, we furnished them with the editions on compact disks.
As space allowed, all the bound volumes were brought into the Sun building, and some shelves were built to allow for organizing them. Taking them to the landfill would be tragic.
The Craighead County Historical Society has arranged with the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library to take temporary possession of the bound volumes while digitizing their pages. That would produce a searchable archive which could be available online.
The future is less certain for these and other materials after the library project is finished. Our best hope is that St. Bernards, as a community-minded organization, will consider making room for them in the renovated building — a sort of museum room.
Otherwise, we’ll need to look elsewhere. Neither the Craighead County Jonesboro library nor the Arkansas State University library has permanent space for the bound volumes.
Those are not the only archives we’re concerned about. The Sun also has negative files dating from the 1970s to the late 1990s, with corresponding proof books that enable a user to find certain negatives. And there are daily journals, clipping files, yearbooks, microfilm and other materials that the Sun staff will have to leave behind.
The Historical Society lacks the space at its “jail facility” or the money to rent storage space, even temporarily. So we’re looking for ideas and-or contributions from citizens who share our concern about these historical materials.
If you have suggestions or ideas, you can contact society president Danny Honnoll at danny@honnoll.com or me at the address below. If you’d like to make a monetary contribution to the cause, send it to Craighead County Historical Society, P.O. Box 1011, Jonesboro, Ark. 72403-1011.
Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun, The Courier at Russellville and The Batesville Guard. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.