By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
In honor of the 90th birthday of The Jewish Transcript/JTNews, we will
be hosting a number of initiatives over the next several months to celebrate
this banner year, starting with the launch
of our online archives. Fire up your web browser and head on over to jtn.stparchive.com to find about 20 years’ worth of Jewish Transcripts that have been scanned and indexed.
This is an exciting completion of the first phase of this project. It’s something we have been working on launching for quite some time, and we are working to begin our next phase so we can add to the collection.
How to browse:
Go to jtn.stparchive.com and click on the big orange button that says “Browse the archives.” That will take you to a page with several years listed. Click on any year you choose, then click on the issue you’d like to look through. You can thumb through the scan of that issue, page by page.
How to search:
Back on that front page, click on the big orange button that says “Search the archives.” Type in any search term — a family name, an event, a location, a memory — and see what comes up. You’ll be able to see the date of the issue and some related text, and from there you’ll be taken to the original scanned page in which your term appeared.
If the year you’re looking for isn’t there, it’s because it hasn’t yet been scanned. We will soon be launching a campaign to fund the next batch of bound copies for digitizing. As these printed archives get older, they have begun to deteriorate, so we need help in preserving them for the next 100 years and beyond. Keep your eyes peeled so you can help out with the effort!
The first phase of scanning was funded by an Ignition grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and a 4Culture Heritage Collections Care grant. We’d also like to extend a special thank you to the Seattle Public Library for sharing its collection so this project could happen.