Collin Cornelison
Editorial Intern

The State Historical Society of Missouri (SHSMO) returned 44 archived volumes of The Northeast News to the Northeast News office this past March, following a nearly three year digitization project.
These volumes, which included single issues from 1936, 1944, 1947, and 1956 as well as a mostly complete collection of bound issues from 1964 to 2010 are once again housed in the office “morgue.”
“These older issues of The Northeast News are frankly, quite fascinating,” said Northeast News Managing Editor, Dorri Partain. “Reading ads from businesses that were common, the church and school bulletins, even the Want Ads, give us a look back in time to what Northeast was like generations ago.”

SHSMO originally transported the volumes to their Columbia offices back in October 2023 to be scanned and digitized. SHSMO catalogs and digitizes selected news publications from around Missouri as a part of their newspaper preservation program.

“Local papers were like Facebook before social media, reporting on births/deaths/marriages, social circles and events, local politics/commerce, and more,” SHSMO Newspaper Librarian Katelyn Ziegler said in a recent email, “they can help historians transport back in time to ‘witness’ the culture, functioning, and happenings in a community.”

Once digitized, these volumes will be available for free on the SHSMO website (SHSMO.org) after a 3-year hold. They are also currently searchable on newspapers.com via subscription.

In 2024, SHSMO staff reported that all 44 volumes had been archived and estimated that they would be available to the public sometime in 2025. But in another email Ziegler said that many of the volumes were still in the queue waiting to be scanned.

“We are exploring an alternative option to share the scanned content with Newspapers.com before the preservation microfilm is created, BUT I am still waiting on the details and procedures from the company so the timing of it being live and searchable is TBD,” Ziegler said in the email.

Normally, SHSMO creates three microfilm copies of each scanned reel, sending the negatives to newspapers.com once or twice a year to be digitized. But before the volumes can even be scanned, they must first be unbound, flattened, stabilized, and mended as needed.

Once newspapers.com has scanned the microfilm negatives, they apply OCR software so that the images of the newspaper on the film becomes text searchable by a computer.

Once digitized, these archived volumes of The Northeast News will be available to the public for the first time and will save researchers and Northeast News staff from hours of flipping through fragile, yellowed newspaper pages.

Ziegler added that SHSMO is currently working in partnership with the Missouri Press Association to digitize more recent Northeast News issues.

In the meantime, Northeast News archival issues from 1998 – 1999, and Dec 2008 – 2015 are currently viewable on newspapers.com and on the SHSMO website at https://shsmo.org/collections/newspapers.
“Our staff has been lucky to have access to these old volumes and we’re looking forward to sharing this information through our partnerships with newspapers.com and assistance from the State Historical Society,” Partain said.

SHSMO has cataloged Missouri newspapers for over 100 years, but only began digitizing them in 2008 as part of a larger federal effort to preserve the country’s historic newspapers. SHSMO’s first digitized paper was an 1808 issue of the St. Louis Missouri Gazette, and as of 2026, they have archived 13,081,601 newspaper pages into the SHSMO database.

SHSMO’s digital newspaper database is free to use, and will give researchers a sense of what the Northeast News issues will look like once they’ve been digitized.