A silent auction is being held in conjunction with the May 6 retirement luncheon for Mary Lou Williamson, long-time editor of the Greenbelt News Review. The auction will raise funds to digitize issues of the News Review and its predecessor, the Greenbelt Cooperator, from 1943 to 2001.
The auction is sponsored by the Greenbelt Archive Project, a new non-profit organization that was established to raise funds and apply for grants to support the digital archive. The News Review is published by the Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Association, Inc., which is a cooperative. As such, it is not eligible to apply for most grants for public service-type projects. Also, monetary contributions to the News Review are not tax-deductible to donors and are taxable income for the paper.
Background
The News Review currently has electronic copies in pdf format of most issues, linked to the Archives page on the paper’s website (greenbeltnewsreview.com). However, anyone who uses the current archive quickly discovers that it is generally unsearchable. Text can be difficult to read and photographs are poorly reproduced. Issues published since 2002 are born digital and are of much higher quality. The pdfs for earlier issues were made from microfilm held by the Greenbelt Library. No one on the News Review staff knows or remembers who commissioned the microfilming of the papers, but it likely was done under the United States Newspaper Program launched in 1982 by the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Read more of this story in the April 26 News Review.