Thursday, July 25, 2019

More Stephenville Newspapers Available at Portal to Texas History

On July 18, Dr. Ana Krahmer, Director of the Digital Newspaper Program at the University of North Texas Libraries, spoke at the Dick Smith Library on the Texas Digital Newspaper Program, the largest statewide open digital newspaper access and preservation repository in the United States. It includes over 7 million newspaper pages, spanning west to east, from El Paso to Newton, and north to south, from Higgins to Brownsville, starting in 1813 and moving up to the present day.



Dr. Krahmer was here because of the recent addition of more issues of Stephenville newspapers to the Portal to Texas History, thanks to a cooperative effort by the Tarleton Libraries and the Dublin Public Library.  The latter applied for a Tocker Foundation grant to digitize the newspaper issues from 1923 through 1965.


Earlier Stephenville newspapers, from 1882 through 1922, were digitized thanks to a Ladd & Katherine Hancher Library Foundation grant obtained by the Stephenville Public Library, again in cooperation with Tarleton Libraries.

So if your research requires old (or current) Stephenville newspapers, here's a current description of what to find where:

Stephenville Newspaper Availability (Empire, Tribune, and Empire-Tribune)

Everything through 1965 is available online for free at the Portal to Texas History:  https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?sort=date_a&fq=untl_collection%3ASTET
Note however that there are a number of gaps, because original newspapers (that were microfilmed and then later digitized) were lost or destroyed before microfilming.

Currently all of our microfilm for issues from 1966 through 1980 is at UNT (the University of North Texas) for digitization and addition to the Portal.  We do not have backup copies of these reels.  Please contact our Periodicals department at 254-968-9867 or periodicals@tarleton.edu 
if you need a reel from this date range so we can coordinate retrieval from UNT.  Note that it may take some time to retrieve the reel(s).


The microfilm for 1981 through 2017 is available in the Periodicals department, on the main floor of the library.  
We will be sending reels from 1981 through 1999 to UNT periodically for digitization, and the previous paragraph will apply, but earlier reels will be returned as they are digitized.


We have bound volumes of issues for 1993 through 2011 at our offsite location. These would need to be requested in advance from the Periodicals department to allow time for retrieval.

Full text of selected (not all) issues from 1930-1978 is available via open access through Newspaper Archive:   https://newspaperarchive.com/us/texas/stephenville/stephenville-empire-tribune/. Use the "Browse by Date" to choose from digitized issues. 

Full text for 2000 - present is available through Access World News, a subscription database. If you are a Tarleton student, faculty member, or staff member, you can access it with your NTNET user name and password at any time.  If you are not affiliated with Tarleton, you would have to come in after 3 p.m. on weekdays or any time on weekends and request a guest pass to use this database in the library.  It is also possible a library near you has this database, but you'd need to check with them to see if they have access to this newspaper.  Simply having a subscription to this database does not mean they have the same newspapers we do.

Selected articles are also available from the Stephenville Empire-Tribune website:  http://www.yourstephenvilletx.com/.

Issues from the current year and previous year are available in print, and are stored in-house in the Periodicals department until they have been microfilmed. 

You might also want to check the Tarleton student newspaper, the J-TAC, which began in 1919.  In earlier years it covered a lot of local news.  It is available on the Portal to Texas History: https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/JTAC/browse/?sort=date_a


The nearby town of Dublin has newspapers from 1882 through 2014 (but with some gaps) available on the Portal: https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?sort=date_a&explore=true&fq=str_location_county%3AErath+County%2C+TX&fq=untl_institution%3ADUBPU


Finally, here is a link to all Erath County newspapers available on the Portal:  https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?fq=dc_type%3Atext_newspaper&explore=true&fq=str_location_county%3AErath+County%2C+TX&sort=date_a

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

One Giant Leap for Mankind

July 16th, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the first spaceflight that landed humans on the moon. It landed on the moon 4 days later.

  The Apollo 11 Saturn V space vehicle lifts off
with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and , Edwin "Buzz" E. Aldrin Jr.,
at 9:32 a.m. EDT July 16, 1969, from Kennedy Space Center. NASA [Public Domain].

You can learn more about this amazing feat of science and engineering by checking out one of these books at the library:
Moon Landing, Project Apollo by James C. Sparks

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon.
You can see Neil Armstrong in the reflection of his visor.
 NASA [Public Domain].