Putting 117 years of the Brown Daily Herald online.
“It’s U.S. history through the eyes of Brown students. The day after Pearl Harbor there’s band practice,” said former Brown Daily Herald editor-in-chief Mary Catherine Lader ’08, referring to a December 1941 issue of the paper.
With former Herald senior editor Anne Wootton, who graduates next winter, and Patrick Yott, who directs the University Library’s digitization drive, Lader gave a forum on a $10,000 pilot project to digitize and put online a searchable archive of 117 years of the paper. (Herald alumna Kristie Miller ’66 funded the project.) For the pilot (http://dl.lib.brown.edu/dbdh), the group chose sample pages from key time periods, including the early years of the paper, both World Wars, and the late 1960s. To digitize the Herald’s entire 117-year history will cost about $300,000, Lader said.
Wootton read from a few sample pages. In the early twentieth century, all incoming students were measured and weighed, and the Herald reported their vital statistics. “The men were an average of five-foot-nine, which seems a little short to me,” she observed. “During World War I, varsity athletics were suspended,” she continued, reading from the October 1, 1918, issue, which reported that 600 Brown men would be inducted as soldiers and sailors that day.
For more information visit www.brownalumnimagazine.com