More than a century of KU student journalism now freely available online

LAWRENCE — KU Libraries have digitized more than 140 years of University of Kansas student newspapers, from the first campus publication in 1878 through 2017, making the collection freely available through Kenneth Spencer Research Library's digital repository. 

The project brings online nearly 200,000 page images from 171 reels of microfilm, encompassing the University Daily Kansan and seven predecessor publications dating to the university's earliest years. The KU Student Newspapers Collection spans eight distinct student newspapers, beginning with The University Courier in 1878 and tracing the evolution of campus journalism through the UDK, which has carried that name since 1912. 

"The UDK tells the story of KU from the student perspective," said Beth Whittaker, associate dean for distinctive collections and director of Spencer Research Library. "Now we're telling that story to the world." 

The student newspaper has long ranked among the most used resources in Spencer Research Library's reading room, alongside course catalogs, yearbooks and university budgets. Previously, access to the collection often required navigating microfilm readers, a technology unfamiliar to many researchers, during library hours. The digitized collection is now available around the clock to anyone with internet access without the need to visit campus. 

“If someone wants to (browse), they can go online and do that anytime,” University Archivist Letha Johnson, who manages the collection where the newspapers are held, told the Daily Kansan. “(Researchers) are not restricted to the hours that we’re open here at Spencer Research Library.” 

The project, years in the making, required collaboration across multiple KU Libraries departments, including cataloging, conservation, digitization and digital initiatives staff, as well as partnership with the Kansas Historical Society, which provided access to pristine master microfilm reels. KU Libraries' own copies had accumulated wear from decades of use. 

"I'm grateful that I get to work with incredibly resilient, adaptable colleagues, whose creativity and expertise was essential to completing this lengthy, complex project," said Scott Hanrath, associate dean for research engagement. 

The scale of the undertaking became apparent early. Of the 171 total microfilm reels, 42 showed signs of vinegar syndrome, a form of film deterioration requiring special handling, and the final repository collection represents approximately five terabytes of image data. Two full-time staff members – KU Libraries’ Digitization Coordinator Melissa Mayhew and Digitization Specialist Warren Lambert – and six library student employees spent more than 300 hours conducting multiple quality assurance reviews of the files. Marianne Reed, KU Libraries’ digital publishing and repository manager, aided the effort as project manager as well as supervising student quality assurance reviewers.

The collection is organized by year and month, allowing researchers to browse chronologically through a newspaper's run. KU Libraries is also piloting an innovative approach to make the dense, complex pages more navigable, using artificial intelligence to generate tables of contents for individual pages, extracting headlines to give users a quick sense of each issue's contents. 

"This is an exploratory effort," Hanrath said, noting that the AI-generated metadata is transparently labeled as such. "We know it’s not perfect, but it is a promising way for us to add value to the materials in this collection." 

The approach was developed by Erin Wolfe, KU Libraries' digital initiatives librarian, and represents a significant improvement over traditional optical character recognition, which can perform poorly on the irregular layouts and varying print quality found across a century of newspaper production. Full-text search at the article level is the next goal. 

The project was supported in part by KU alums Scott and Lisa Ritchie, whose philanthropic support for KU Libraries reflects a belief that the university's history should be accessible to anyone, not just those who can visit campus today, but those who want to understand how KU has transformed over time. 

“The UDK archive represents students’ perspectives on the entire history of the University — and, by extension, the history of Kansas and of the country," said Nick Jungman, director of strategy for the University Daily Kansan. “Having those perspectives online at the fingertips of the public and of researchers is a valuable resource. Kansas has a proud history of encouraging and fostering student journalists, and the UDK has one of the strongest traditions in all of student journalism. Students — driven by their inexperience, to be sure, but also by their enthusiasm and their fundamental honesty — are often offering a different narrative than professional journalists, and that should give depth to our understanding of the past. 

"We’ve heard from dozens of alumni who’ve spent hours poring through this archive, reminding themselves of how much they enjoyed their time at KU and how much it shaped who they are today. If nothing else, having the entire history of the Kansan online is a way to remind our alumni and every Kansan what a special place this is that we are building.” 

To read current stories from the University Daily Kansan, visit the UDK website.