milwaukee journal sentinel photo archives

#Milwaukee journal sentinel photo archives archive

“The price they were asking for the database was a surprise, so we chose not to act on it,” Kiely said.įor the Journal archives alone from 1841-1960, the company was asking for a $1.5 million payment! - with an additional one per cent assessment for the next three years. …In spring, a salesperson from NewsBank came calling to Kiely, offering on May 3rd to sell the rights to the database to the library, this same database which had gotten 30 percent of its materials from the library. Library Rejected NewsBank $1.5 million Demand in 2016Īs I wrote here in August, 2016, when the archives first disappeared, City Librarian Paula Kiely received a visitor one day: The target, in this case, is the Milwaukee Public Library. Each firm has seen the archives as a desirable source of revenue, to be provided ideally at taxpayer expense. Gatehouse Media merged with Gannett in 2019, giving the Journal Sentinel its fourth owner in four years. … Last I heard, UWM could not afford the asking price for digital access. I’ve had conversations with David Haynes at the paper and Michael Doylen at the UWM library about this issue, which is clearly about the new owners trying to monetize an asset.

#Milwaukee journal sentinel photo archives archive

Seligman, Ph.D., is the former chair of UW-Milwaukee History Department and a co-lead editor of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee History.Īll the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee links to the Google News archive are permanently broken, and the fun Understory we published about interpreting the details of the URL obsolete. January 1st, April 1st, etc.) for a day or more and reappear after phone calls.” History Held Hostage NewsBank is online again.”Īnother person on the group made this observation: “A few times over the past two years, NewsBank’s historic The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel would sometimes disappear on the first of the month of a quarter (e.g. The archives reappeared shortly thereafter, leading Baehr to write, “My email must have worked, at least temporarily.

The Journal and Sentinel are no longer available in NewsBank or the Google Archives. Looks like we no longer have online access to Milwaukee newspapers for most of the 20th century. On February 6th, NewsBank had one of its intermittent blackouts, causing some concern to, among others, Carl Baehr, a retired librarian who writes the City Streets column for Urban Milwaukee.īaehr posted a message to an e-mail group: Previous to 2016, the old newspapers could be freely found and searched via Google and NewsBank. That “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t” resource is the only link to a searchable database of the city’s history as recorded in the daily press - an irreplaceable public asset, and one that should be readily accessible. It appears that the encyclopedia, like many other sites, has been partially crippled by the frequent disappearance of The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel archives. Many of the footnotes in the site naturally led to stories in the city’s historic daily newspapers, particularly The Milwaukee Journal (founded in 1882) and Milwaukee Sentinel (founded in 1837) which merged in 1995. … Entries include footnotes that allow readers to see where authors found their information.” The growing database includes “approximately 700 entries on Milwaukee history topics ranging from arts and culture to philanthropy and nonprofit organizations to business and labor. The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee is a a Digital Humanities Project sponsored by the History Department in the College of Letters and Science at UW-Milwaukee.