Jun 09, 2018 Hot Type: Digitizing Utah’s Historical Newspapers

Written by Jeremy Myntti

At the Utah Library Association Annual Conference on May 17, 2018, Jeremy Myntti and Tina Kirkham presented “Hot Type: Digitizing Utah’s Historical Newspapers.” This presentation contained a history of the Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN) Program, and tour of the new https://digitalnewspapers.org/ website, information on how other institutions and partners can help build UDN, and a discussion about what the future has in store for UDN.

This session was sponsored by the ULA Genealogy Round Table, so we ended the presentation with information about how UDN can be used for family history research, such as finding birth announcements, obituaries, wedding announcements, military service, and many other tidbits of information about the lives of our ancestors.

As J. Cecil Alter, in Early Utah Journalism, said:

“The old newspaper files, like the human lives they represent, are precious beyond valuation, for they cannot be replaced; and within their aging covers are the records of the chief events of every person that ever lived in the community, from the birth to the funeral—besides the stories in intimate detail of every event of public importance in the history of the town and country.”

– Alter, J. Cecil. (1938). Early Utah Journalism.
Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society. Page 15

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