by Katrina Swift, Archives Advisor for the Council of Archives New Brunswick

In celebration of the International Archives Week theme “#ArchivesUnited,” the ACA Public Awareness and Advocacy Committee has coordinated with Canadian professional archival associations to present a special series of blog posts. This series will run on the ACA blog, In the Field, from June 5-9 and aims to uplift the work of our colleagues across Canada by showcasing new initiatives, providing transparent solutions to key issues, and identifying exciting opportunities for collaboration.

With rapidly changing formats and the widening distribution of news media, tracking the history of provincial news publications has reached a critical juncture.

On October 18^th, 2021, with this pressing issue in mind, the Council of Archives New Brunswick (CANB) hosted a New Brunswick Newspaper Forum with collecting institutions (museums, libraries, and archives) from across New Brunswick to discuss current collecting and preservation practices and challenges. The meeting also looked at ways to move forward in a coordinated manner in the area of newspaper collection and preservation in the province.

Institutions in attendance highlighted the need to have information from New Brunswick newspapers accessible in one place. The closest thing the province had was the New Brunswick Newspaper Directory, which was originally a 1996 book/directory created by Helen Craig but had subsequently been built into an online database hosted by the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (PANB). However, the directory had fallen into disuse and was in desperate need of revision.

The solution decided upon at the meeting was to update the New Brunswick Newspaper Directory and improve the online database so that it was more easily searchable and accessible. Thus began the New Brunswick Historical Newspapers Project. The goal of this project is to centralize all known information and holdings of newspapers published in New Brunswick from the earliest publication (the Royal St. John’s Gazette and Nova Scotia Intelligencer in 1783) to the present day. It is a collaboration between CANB, PANB, and the University of New Brunswick (UNB) Libraries, with the support of many libraries and archives across the province, country, and continent. The data collected on newspaper holdings will be of all formats – hard copy/print, microform, and digital – and will be collected and staged on the New Brunswick Historical Newspapers Project website, hosted by UNB Libraries.

Over the past several months, the team working behind this project has been reaching out to institutions across the continent who had previously been known to hold historical New Brunswick newspapers, from small museums to the Library of Congress, to verify data to accurately reflect which institutions still hold what papers. Along with this work, institutions are being asked to add any of their additional newspaper holdings. The next phase of the project will involve doing a call-out to institutions province-wide. This way, all holdings not previously captured in the New Brunswick Newspaper Directory will be represented.

This project will be of key use to libraries, archives, museums, and researchers working in the field of New Brunswick studies. It will also identify and flag provincial newspapers worthy of digitization to improve access to these amazingly rich sources.