Daily since 1891, The Brown Daily Herald remains the paper of record for the Brown University community. For more than 115 years, The Herald has published daily campus news, capturing life at Brown University and student perspectives on world events: political protests, athletic wins and losses, academic pursuits, curricular changes and students’ world-changing innovation. Now, The Herald seeks to make this incomparable history of Brown – written and produced by students since the paper’s founding – publicly available online.
Since the launch of The Brown Daily Herald Digital Archive in May 2008, over 20 additional years –almost 20,000 additional pages – from The Herald's bound volumes have been digitized. More refined search capabilities – including thumbnails, greater browse functionality and highlighted search terms and articles – are also planned for the future. We have made a lot of progress, but we still need to raise $100,000 to ensure these documents survive for posterity.
In honor of the University's 250th anniversary celebration, The Brown Daily Herald is attempting to finish our digitization project to provide online access to The Herald’s entire archive, from 1891 forward. Stored in bound volumes at Brown’s John Hay Library University Archive, past issues of The Herald are a valuable, but frequently untapped, resource for journalists, historians and others interested in exploring Brown University’s history.These archives are disintegrating. They lack any formal indexing, making the useful information contained within their pages difficult to access. The Herald is committed to preserving and making available this important record of Brown’s history.
Read more about how the digitization process works...
When digitization is complete, Herald readers of all stripes will be able to access every article they’ve ever written with a click; current students will be able to search for any subject in The Herald over the span of more than a century; and historians, scholars and novelists will be able to read about the thoughts and lives of Brunonians over the course of two World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, man’s first walk on the Moon and September 11, 2001.
Though The Herald has long been an incorporated nonprofit organization independent from the University, we are excited to be collaborating with the Brown University Library to create a searchable, online database of all Herald content published since 1891. As part of this partnership, the Library has provided the most complete set of our physical bound volumes for digitization and invaluable technical expertise from staff at its Center for Digital Initiatives.
