Early coverage of Tombstone’s gunfight at OK Corral included

The National Endowment for the Humanities gave the state a $400,000 grant to digitally catalog historic state newspapers and make them available online.

“We have more than 100 titles and 100,000 pages from almost every paper to ever exist in this state,” said Ted Hale, a State Library, Archives and Public Records department spokesman for the project, Arizona Newspapers: 1880-1912.

Arizona is one of six states to receive such a grant in 2008. It was announced Tuesday.

“The Library of Congress has a lack of Western newspapers in its archives, and the federal government thought it was important to help,” Hale said Wednesday.

The historical value of many articles is immense, he said.

“We have the 1881Tombstone Epitaph issue covering the OK Corral gunfight,” Hale said.

“Instead of relying on Hollywood for information, you can read about the shootout from the guy who reported it the next day,” he said.

Mining boomtown newspapers such as the Bisbee Evening Miner show the way many early Arizonans lived.

“Ads show all sorts of ‘snake oils’ to cure illness, with substances long since banned by the (Food and Drug Administration),” Hale said.

Most newspapers were cataloged on microfilm in the 1940s and 1950s, but the form of storage is fallible, Hale said.

“They start to deteriorate, literally disappearing before your eyes,” Hale said.

The microfilm will be shipped to the Library of Congress for digitizing, then displayed on its National Digital Newspapers Project Web site before being sent back to Arizona.

Upon its return, the digital collection will be available on the library’s Arizona Memory Project Web site.

According to the Web site, the Memory Project is an effort to provide access to primary sources of information in Arizona libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions. The initiative provides the opportunity to view some of the best examples of government documents, photographs, maps, and objects that chronicle Arizona’s past and present.

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The National Digital Newspaper Project can be found online at http://www.loc.gov/ndnp.

The Arizona Memory Project’s Web site is: http://azmemory.lib.az.us

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Local. Tags for this post: Arizona, History/Culture, Local-History/Culture, Local-History/Culture-Arizona, Luke Davis, page-a05. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.