Indianapolis Recorder Archive

The University Library at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and Indianapolis Recorder newspaper have teamed up to put issues of the Indianapolis Recorder newspaper, an African-American newspaper, online. The years spanned are 1899 to 2005 and total over 5000 issues. The archive is freely available at http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/digitalscholarship/collections/Irecorder. (This archive is not complete; issues from 1917-1925, and January-April of 1932, are missing.)

You can do a text search, browse by year, or do a full browse of the archive (over 5200 items!) I went to browse the 1904 archives. I got 53 thumbnails of the newspaper. Clicking on one took me to a large version of it, with tools for zooming, moving around, and clipping. Unfortunately the panning was done by clicking and not click-and-drag; made it more difficult to enjoy the archives.

The 1904 papers I looked at were all four pages. The scanning was very good and I didn’t have any trouble reading anything once I zoomed in enough. The pages are whole and also include those nifty old advertisements.

Trying a keyword search, I looked for Evansville and got over 4000 results. The keyword for which you’re searching is highlighted in bright red and easy to find even when pages are displayed at only 10% size. (Even the ads have the text indexed; useful.)

It would be great if it were somewhat easier to read these pages, with better zoom and pan tools (downloading issues would be especially great but I’m guessing that, with the archive going to 2005, that’s not going to be possible.) This archive, spanning over 100 years, has tons of content to explore.