Another Puzzler

Some reading this blog may be aware of the many gaps in the collections of old Minden newspapers. The first local paper was published in the late 1840s, yet we have few issues preserved anywhere until 1878, when a five year run of one local paper exists in microfilm, then we go into a fifteen year gap until 1898. From 1898 forward, there are some papers preserved from nearly every year, but with some very "untimely" gaps at moments when significant events occurred locally.

Before last night, so far as I had known, prior to 1878 we had one or two issues of the Minden Herald from the 1850s, and nothing else (despite the fact that on a couple of occasions during the 1860s as many as three papers were being published in Minden.) While I was organizing my research plan for a Saturday morning trip to Hill Memorial Library at LSU, I stumbled across an item in the archival collection I had not recalled seeing before - a listing for a single copy of the Minden Democrat dated September 11, 1868. I have been a fairly regular researcher at Hill and I did not recall seeing that listing in my prior visits. The last time I had been to Hill was in the summer of 2008. Seeing this "new" listing, I made a note to add that item to the top of my research list for this morning.

This morning when I got to Hill and requested the item, the really puzzling part began. The catalog listing said that the issue was in a format I had never before seen in my research. When I asked the librarian what the format abbreviation meant, she told me that it indicated the newspaper was on a CD -- very odd. Almost all the newspapers in the collections at most archives are in either bound hard copy form or in microform where the copies were made from the hard copies in the library's possession. She, like me, had never before seen a newspaper archived in CD format. This issue of the Democrat was given to the LSU libraries in the form of scanned TIF images burned onto a CD. The library does not have and never has had the original paper copy. The year of donation is not clear, either, but I am almost certain (as certain as a confused old man can be) that this record was not part of the collection two and one-half years ago when I last visited.

To "get" a copy, all I had to do was simply copy the four images to my laptop and I am bringing them back home to read and enjoy. However, I have already submitted a request to the LSU libraries to see if they can tell me the source of the images. Somewhere out there, someone has an issue of the Minden Democrat in great shape that they chose to share with the LSU library. The historian -- or maybe just the plain old nosy person in me -- has to wonder who they might be and what other local history treasures they might own. I'm looking forward to getting home and working with the actual newspaper image, but I'm more excited over the possibility that this newspaper copy might open the door to more of our lost historical record emerging from the mysts of the past.