The Princeton Public Library, 424 West Water Street hosted two learning sessions, one at 2 p.m. and one at 6 p.m., on Monday, December 12 to teach anyone who is interested how to use the new historic Princeton newspaper archives. This event provided the opportunity for a major
partner in this endeavor, the Princeton Historical Society, to announce the launch of their new website.
Princeton Historical Society’s new website, https://princetonwihistoricalsociety.org/ has a link to
the digitized newspapers as does the Princeton Public Library website. Here is a tiny url: https://tinyurl.com/2t6kk9yj. This link will take you to a page that will allow you to browse
Princeton newspapers including:
– Green Lake County Democrat 1879-1885
– Princeton Republic 1867-1937
– Princeton Republic-Star 1905-1906
– Princeton Star 1902-1905
– Princeton Times 1935-1937
– Princeton Times-Republic 1937-1993
This resource is free on the internet and available to anyone to use without a library card. The browse page allows interested individuals to browse old Princeton newspapers but the host of this digital resource, the Winnefox Library System, provides a rather strong search
engine.
By clicking on the tab ‘simple search’ researchers can search the newspaper archives by word, year, month, and date. There is also a means to search particular fields, and if you click on the box with the plus sign, you can deepen your search by using ‘and’ to add multiple search terms, ‘or’ to provide synonyms for your search term, ‘not’ to eliminate
items not relevant to your search, and ‘near’ to search for terms that are printed close to each other.
Search results are sortable by relevance, title, and publication date. Once a particular newspaper is chosen, the website provides the searcher with the options to select text for transcription, rotate the file, and zoom in and out.
This resource is the result of a huge collaborative effort. The Princeton Historical Society provided the newspapers in the form of 81 reels of microfilm. The digitization was made
possible with contributions from the Princeton Historical Society, the Princeton Public Library, the Caestecker Library’s Tom Gnewuch Memorial Fund, a Wisconsin Humanities grant, and the Winnefox Library System. The total cost was $17,000 and this process took
over a year to complete. The entire project was headed up by Library Director Laura Skalitzky who is offering free
printouts of the newspaper from the day you were born for a limited time. Check out the Princeton newspaper archives on the Princeton Public Library website or the new
Princeton Historical Society website.
