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iQNTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEWSPAPER PROJECT A UNION LIST OF MONTANA NEWSPAPERS IN MONTANA, REPOSITORIES Funded by a grant from the U.S. Newspaper Program, Office of Preservations National. Endowment for the Humanities Decembers 1986 COPYRIGHT 1978-10B8 OCLCs INC. Til® Union L1®t Agent or* library' 1® authorised under all 0CIC copyright® i@ reproduce! distribute copies of this list without limit. ) MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEWSPAPER PROJECT NAME ENTRY INDEX COPYRIGHT 1978-1986 OCLC, INC. Tha Union List Agent or library 1s authorized under all OCLC copyrights to reproduce and distribute copies of this 11st without limit. INTRODUCTION This union listing of 1,121 Montana newspapers is the fruit of a three and one half year project centered at the Montana Historical Society in Helena, and principally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities(NEH). The project, to paraphrase from the original grant proposal, was to survey, catalog, and enter into the CONSER national serials data base via the Online Computer Library Center(OCLC) automated system the bibliographical and holdings information for all Montana newspapers held in publicly-accessible repositories in Montana, and to produce a union list of these newspapers. The project also microfilmed selected backruns in the Society's collection, and borrowed and filmed papers not previously held by the Society. The running title on this list, "Montana Historical Society Newspaper Project," is a misnomer, a happenstance of the way the list was identified in OCLC. More accurately, this was the "Montana Newspaper Project," this state's participation in the ambitious United States Newspaper Program of the Office of Preservation at NEH. The program hopes to eventually fund such a project in each state and territory, and thus have records for all the nation's extant newspapers entered into a single data base. Besides eight "national" repositories, selected to enter only their own holdings because of the extent and broad geographic coverage of their collections, some 28 states are now involved in one or another stage of a newspaper project-— planning/surveying, cataloging, or microfilming. Montana has been something of a pioneer, the first state to attempt and complete both a cataloging and microfilming phase. Several circumstances put us in a particulary favorable position to receive funds as soon as they were made available for state projects. The Historical Society had made newspapers a main concern from its inception in 1 865 , not long after the first Montana newspaper, the Mont ana Po st, appeared in Virginia City. Thus the Society collection already contained the vast majority of papers ever published in the territory or state, while no other repository held a significant number of unique titles or runs. There was not the same need for coordination beween several large repositories, nor for identifying unique issues in a large number of scattered small repositories that confronts projects in more populous and older states. Certainly our relatively brief newspaper publishing history, dating only from August 27» 1864, gave us less sheer volume with which to deal. We were able to proceed quickly with a centralized project, involving only one grant-funded cataloger and assistant, supported by the regular staff of the library. Microfilming was done at the state Records Management office in Helena, which for a decade has filmed the preceding year’s run of current newspapers for the Historical Society. The project was a particular boon for Montana inasmuch as we had no bibliography of state newspapers. Technically, we still don’t. A fullblown bibliography would include entries for newspapers known to have once existed, but of which no issues have been found, while non-extant newspaper titles appear here only if they form part of the genealogy of an extant paper, A comprehensive bibliography would also have attempted to fully identify proprietors and editors, a.desireable reference feature and one which was attempted at the start of the project, but abandoned because of the extraordinary amounts of time that ferreting out such seemingly simple items consumes. Owners and editors are listed for some newspapers, but not for others. Thus this is a union list, not a bibliography. But it is compre­ hensive. There are probably no more than thirty newspapers, probably all short-lived and some of which might not have been newspapers at all, whose titles were discovered in the course of the project, but for which no issues could be located. Certainly this listing supercedes the various fragmentary listings we have had to work with before--Winifred Gregory's classic, 1937, union list, American Newspapers 1812-1936; the various volumes from the Library of Congress, Newspapers in Microform; the Bell & Howell commercial catalog of newspapers on microfilm; the 1977 Union List of Montana Ser ials; various typed lists of holdings of some Montana libraries and the venerable card file by which the Society library previously controlled its collection. The project also provided an opportunity to put more system and persistance into the search for "missing" newspapers than had ever been possible before. Somewhat to the library's surprise, a preliminary survey and follow-ups of 305 likely or at least possible places newspapers might be found flushed out 28 titles not previously represented in the Society collection, and found missing issues for 52 others. Some of these were aleady ensconsed in libraries, historical societies and museums, but more came from city halls and newspaper offices and several from individuals. Some had been perfectly well known to and used by local researchers, but others had been forgotten even by their owners, including one in the Society's own collection. These have now been filmed, along with issues from 102 titles from the Society's holdings Such serious obstacles to Montana research as not having available on microfilm the older portions of the daily Miles City newspaper have been removed, and many small, unbound runs with a high risk of being lost or damaged have been secured on film. The only extensive runs left unfilmed are portions of such "second" dailies from the larger towns as the Butte Daily Post, the Great Falls Lead er, the Helena Record-Her aid, and the Missoula Sentinel. These were bypassed because of limited funds, and the fact that another daily from the same town was already available on film. It is now possible for a researcher who has access to the OCLC system anywhere in the nation to determine if a particular Montana news­ paper is available, where copies are located, and in what format. In cooperation with the most recent Union List of Montana Serials project using the Western Library Network!WLN), the Society forwarded cataloging worksheets to Northern Montana College Library, and some 397 records with Society holdings were also entered into that system. Because the Montana project was part of a computerized, national project, it had to conform to certain rules and procedures that were either required by the system, or desired by the U.S. Newspaper Program for consistency and standardization. Persons familiar with the Anglo- American Cataloging Rules for serials, or with OCLC serials listings, should have no trouble deciphering the entries. Others may find them a bit puzzling at first, and the following information is offered to assist in the use of the listing. DEFINITION OF A NEWSPAPER/ TYPES NOT INCLUDED The first problem was to determine what was a newspaper. To quote from the Newspaper Cataloging Manual used by all participants in the national project, a newspaper is a serial publication which is designed to be a primary source of written information on current events connected with public affairs, either local, national, and/or international in scope. It contains a broad range of news on all subject matter..[and is] intended for the general public. [It] usually has the following [physical] characteristics: it is originally printed on newsprint; it does not have a cover; it has a masthead; and it has a format of not less than four columns per page. While the Manual further defined eligible publics and wrestled with the problem of ethnic newspapers, it also specifically excluded "Publications of organizations which are designated primarily for members of the organization," and "Publications which are limited and/or addressed to a special clientele, [and] to specific topic or subject matter." Despite the Manual’s best effort, many serial publications remain on debatable ground. Perhaps the most noticeable absences from this list will be the student newspapers from the various Montana colleges and universities; most, but not all, religiously-affiliated serials; and most Native American tribal publications, where often any distinction between newsletter and newspaper is most difficult to make. Montana newspapers in out-of-state repositories are also not listed. Technical features of the project made this undesirable, but fortunately circumstances make it relatively unimportant. There simply aren’t sizable holdings of Montana newspapers outside the state. The Library of Congress, for instance, has holdings, by no means all complete, for only 37 Montana titles. In the course of the project, we encountered an entry already put into the data base by one of the national repositories for only 95 of the 1,121 titles. By far the greatest number of these came from the Historical Society of Wisconsin, and in each case we had to modify those records because Montana holdings were more complete. Non-Montana newspapers in Montana repositories were also excluded, with the exception of a handful of regional newspapers in the Society’s collection which we felt had particular usefulness to the early history of the territory. FINDING A NEWSPAPER IN THE LISTING • One should normally start with the "Name Entry Index," which is actually an index by town.

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