Research Tools: New Project Makes Archive of Historic LGBT Newspaper (Bay Area Reporter) Available Online

From LGBT Weekly:

An initiative to put the full contents of the longest-running continuously published LGBT weekly in the United States online has reached its first milestone with the posting of five years of historic back issues.
The GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco has been working for a year to digitize the Bay Area Reporter, founded in 1971. The newspaper’s own website offers articles published since 2005, but earlier issues of the publication had previously been available only at the society’s archives or via microfilm in a handful of research libraries.
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With full funding from the San Francisco-based Bob Ross Foundation, the GLBT Historical Society acquired the specialized equipment and hired the staff needed to undertake the digitization project. Tom Horn, trustee of the foundation, stressed the exceptional historical value of the content the project is making available:
“Launching an online, searchable archive of the Bay Area Reporter is a tremendous step toward giving scholars and the public alike access to a first draft of the history of our movement,” he noted. “Users will see what the issues of the time were; the personalities who shaped our movement; what was happening politically, socially and culturally. They will even see how gay people met, socialized, sought housing and found lovers — and how advertisers reached out to our community. The online archive will be an indispensable tool in telling our story.”

Direct to Bay Area Reporter Digital Archive
Learn More About the Project, Read the Complete Article

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