Kent State University Libraries Release 1970s Daily Kent Staters Online

KENT, Ohio (February 4, 2015) - Kent State University’s department of Special Collections and Archives is proud to announce the launch of the digital edition of the 1970s Daily Kent Staters. This online, full-text searchable collection is the result of months of collaborative efforts and will enable the Libraries to provide exciting new research opportunities to users all over the world. The Digital Kent Stater archive, available at www.library.kent.edu/dks, now includes all issues from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Researchers and the curious alike will no longer have to come in person to view print versions of this legacy-defining decade at Kent State. The university that existed in December of 1969 and the one that emerged in January of 1980 were worlds apart. Now, users everywhere can see this transition for themselves in almost 17,000 pages of campus history. Each page of the Stater was scanned at high resolution and made available for anyone with an Internet connection. Users have the option to browse by date, search the entire run of the 1970s for names and keywords, or simply read through the paper day-by-day.

Another new resource available within the Digital Stater site is crowd-sourced text correction. The optical character recognition process that most text-based digital projects employ is not perfect in correctly identifying each and every character on a scanned page of text. Now users can help clean up any full-text errors they encounter by participating in this crowd-sourced correction process. User account set up is easy and any corrections made will help future users access more accurate information and execute more successful searches.

This release of the 1970s Daily Kent Staters underscores the Libraries’ continuing commitment to provide first class materials and research opportunities both in-person and online. In the coming year, the 1950s and 1980s will also be available as the Libraries work toward the goal of providing digital access to the entire run of the university newspaper.

Contact:
Cara Gilgenbach, Head, Special Collections and Archives