Not too long after she started her freshman year at the University of Minnesota Morris, Jenny Antonsen ‘18 wandered into the offices of the University Register (UR), the student-run newspaper, for layout night. Another student gave her a tour of the office in the basement of the Multi-Ethnic Resource Center.
There was some office clutter, a couple of couches, a TV, and Page the fish, but the most prominent feature for Antonsen “was the copious stacks of papers that were everywhere. It was crazy because there were papers that looked newer, and then you could kind of see the shade go from new paper to really old, and it was all over the place, and I remember asking, ‘what are those?’”
It was a collection of past issues of the paper, stacked randomly throughout the office, and to Antonsen’s dismay, no one seemed to care.
“I figured, you know, I could write a few articles for the paper, and then after I get my articles in, I could just hang out in the office and mess around with the papers. I wanted to get the office kind of clean to use it for other things.”
This seemingly simple task turned into a decade-long project to archive every issue of every student newspaper since UMN Morris opened its doors in 1960.
“I didn't think that I needed anybody else's help or permission to do it, so I just started to make my own database.”
Eventually, she recognized that this was too much for one person and visited with the campus’s archivist, Steve Gross. As it turns out, neither the campus archives nor the UR offices had a complete collection of back issues.
Thus began Antonsen’s passion project to collect and digitize every edition of the campus’s student newspapers.
“I kind of figured out this is really important to do because as I was going through these papers and seeing all these articles and all these ideas, I was like, wow! This really told a story of the culture of the campus, and that story is a story of community, DIY do-it-yourself energy, and it's a story of free thinking, and organizing, and incredibly high energy throughout all of campus history.”
Initially, Antonsen enlisted the help of students in the History Club to scan each issue. But it became apparent pretty quickly that they needed a better scanner and more consistent effort.
That’s when Briggs Library’s metadata and technical services coordinator, Naomi Skulan, got involved. With her help, Antonsen was able to get support for this project through the University of Minnesota Morris Archives, including funds to hire student employees through the work-study program and training and access to a large-format scanner for the group of History Club volunteers. Most of the newspapers were scanned by History Club volunteers and then later work study students.
As of January 2024, 1,325 newspapers have been scanned, bringing the total to 1,408 newspapers that can be viewed digitally in the Prairie Portal.
Skulan notes that the archives are searchable and are getting heavy usage-–7,624 page views in fiscal year 2023.
Antonsen hopes that having an archive of student voices telling the story of life on this college on the prairie will give others the same hope she found:
“It really gives you a perspective on what it means to be young and what it means to be struggling with ideas and what it means to be idealistic. Once you dig into it, you'll see how important these voices are and these perspectives are to discovering the spirit of a nation. Because, like Harvard and Yale have their perspectives on things, but the University of Minnesota Morris represents a certain type of people who gathered on the prairie to speak their piece.”
While the archive project is complete, Antonsen’s interest continues, as she participates in the ‘Alumni in the Archives’ summer camp hosted by Briggs Library each summer.
