Barometer Reel, 1977 and various 1970s articles
Throughout the year many students researching minority groups and multicultural issues on campus ask for assistance locating appropriate resouces. One of the resouces we always suggest is OSU’s student newspaper, The Daily Barometer. The Barometer is a fantastic source of information regarding special events and campus controversies as well as a great way to get a sense of the general atmosphere on campus from the student perspective.
Thanks to the archives, we have copies of the Barometer dating back to the early 1900s both in print, in large bound editions, as well as on microfilm, which can be viewed via specialized equipment. While researchers have access to these materials, unless you know the exact date of an article, it can be a very tedious and time consuming process to search the newspaper day-by-day to find relevant articles. Unfortunately, we do not have a comprehensive index specific to minority related articles and the microfilm is not full-text searchable.
So, a few months ago, the OMA initiated a project to search through the Barometer (day-by-day) to find as many minority issues/multicultural related articles as possible. We plan to create full text searchable PDFs of those articles with a table of contents and make them all available online via OSU’s Oregon Digital.
We decided to start with the 1970s as the first set of years to search. At OSU, the 1970s saw a lot of progressive changes on campus including a university wide report regarding minorities, the creation of three cultural centers on campus, and a lot of coverage regarding cultural events as well as opinon pieces regarding how far the campus as a whole had come as well as how much work had yet to be done.
The OMA is excited to share the first batch of articles, 1970-1979, and in April of 2013 we added articles from 1960-1969, and then in February of 2015 we added the 1980s!
Minorities in the Barometer Online Collection
Over the course of the next few months we plan to search through as many decades as we can for relevant articles and will add them to the Oregon Digital collection. And, of course, we will be sure to post about it!
Related Materials:
This past April, the OMA created a presentation specific to the History of the 4Cs mostly consisting of articles from the Barometer ~ 4Cs presentation
Are articles or materials from the 80’s and 90’s being digitized as well?
Great question! We started with the 1970s and hope to continue the scanning project to include the 1980s and 1990s. Until then, the microfilmed copies of the Barometer are available for use on the 3rd floor of the Valley Library.