California: “More Than a Century of Bay Area’s Jewish News Now Free Online for All to Read”

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

On Sue Fishkoff’s first day as editor of the Jewish News of Northern California, she noticed the publication’s old, bound volumes piled up in the lunch room of its San Francisco office — “dozens of huge big black leather-bound books on top of filing cabinets, some stacked on top of each other, kind of thrown around.”

“I picked one up from 1903, started looking at it, and the tops of some pages started to crumble,” she said. “I thought, ‘Dear Lord, before I leave this job, I will put all of this online.’”

Nearly 11 years later, she’s finally reached her goal. The newspaper’s online digital archives, containing 6,151 issues and nearly 700,000 articles over 127 years, are now up for free, public viewing, the Jewish News of Northern California announced Friday.

A nonprofit called Digital Divide Data scanned and digitized the microfilmed newspapers, dating to the first issue in 1895, which are hosted at the National Library of Israel and at UC Riverside. But starting the archival process was not swift or easy. Fishkoff did the fundraising, pointing out the the bookshelves holding the gold-embossed volumes to anyone who came to the offfice and mentioning the need for money to archive them.

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Direct to Jewish News of Northern California Online Digital Archives

See Also: Digitizing J.’s Archives Was a Mission to Save Jewish History (via The Jewish News of Northern California)

See Also: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Digital Collections, Libraries, National Libraries, News