I first read about the great news below in the August 8, 2010, Oregonian, and have just found a press release on Multnomah County Library’s website:

Multnomah County Library now features the only publicly available, complete full-text digitized archive of The Oregonian newspaper. Multnomah County Library cardholders can now access every article, editorial, illustration, photograph and advertisement published in The Oregonian between 1861 and 1972. By the end of this year, the archive will include all editions up to 1987.

This new database supplements the full-text Oregonian LexisNexis database from 1987-Present available through the Multnomah County Library and the Portland State University Library (and other college & university libraries).

A few weeks ago I was at the Central Library to research the Oregonian and Oregon Journal, and I was pleased to see that library staff had installed a few work stations that enabled researchers to create digital images from microfilm scans (instead of printing hard copies). At the time, I considered this a great step forward, for at least three reasons. First, it would cut down on the use of paper; second, it would reduce the amount of physical space that I need to devote to storing my research files; and, finally, it enabled me to create digital images directly that I might be able to use in future publications.*

This new database is even less resource-intensive, because one will no longer even have to expend the fuel or energy to get to a library location during operating hours to sit at the microfilm stations.

Here is what the program interface looks like:

In addition to searching for keywords, one can also browse by date:

This is what an individual page looks like when selected:

One can print the page, or sections of the page, from one’s computer, either as a hard copy or as a PDF. As an aside, once one has a PDF, one can use Adobe Acrobat to export the file as a JPEG or TIFF, and, thereby, create digital images that can be used in other publications (i.e., journal articles and books). Of course, one cannot do this without first securing copyright permission from the Oregonian, but I, for one, am glad to have this option when original images are no longer available, or for those times when I might want to showcase an image of the newspaper itself.

Comparing the page above with my own hard-copy print that I made from microfilm some months ago, it seems as though the image available online was made from the same microfilm. This can be a negative attribute if the original microfilm is of poor quality, but I’ve heard that, for the most part, the original paper copies of newspapers were destroyed at the time they were microfilmed.

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* As usually happens when I’m perusing through newspapers, I get distracted by any number of advertisements and images. On my personal blog, I wrote about some amusing images I came across, and used these images under fair use provisions.