Local Historians Hope Digitization Will Make Newspaper Archive
Accessible To All
Archive Documents A Century Of Local History
Meet Gary McAulay. As a board member of the Manhattan Beach Historical Society, Gary is one of the lucky few who currently have access to the Society’s small storage space, which is nestled between the men and women’s restrooms at Polliwog Park and filled with a century’s worth of Manhattan Beach history. The newspapers are kept in bound archives on three small bookshelves, each one four rows tall. The old papers document Manhattan Beach history, starting with the city’s founding in the year 1912.
In the photo seen here, McAulay sifts through the papers, stopping at the headline “Rain storm of week un-paralleled in beach history,” on the front page of the March 1, 1913 publication of the Manhattan Beach News. Another day’s top story simple led with ““Popular girl will soon be married.” McAulay and his colleagues at the Manhattan Beach Historical Society hope that the collection of historical newspapers will soon find a new home, as plans for the new Manhattan Beach library continue to develop. Local historians recently met with representatives from the Los Angeles County library to discuss the feasibility of bringing the collection to the new library, and digitizing it via a type of photo scanning technology.
The collection was moved about two years ago from its former home in the Historical Society’s cottage museum to its current, less prestigious and less accessible spot in the park bathroom storage space. This move was decided upon by the members of the society, who feared that a fire or other natural disaster affecting the cottage museum might destroy these precious articles of history. The papers have been “sadly inaccessible for some time,” said McAulay. “We have a history in this town. When you put it out there, people say, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool,’ and become more interested.” Even when the papers were in the Historical Society’s museum, they were only accessible to regular folks during the museum’s six hours of public access each week.
Ultimately, the Historical Society would like to use digital photo scanning technology to preserve the papers and make them available to the public on a website, but the funding just isn’t there, McAulay said. Each of the historical society’s 150 members pays $20 each year in dues. Scholars at Cal State Dominguez Hills have expressed interest in obtaining the archives to keep in the university’s regional history collection. But local historians are hesitant to let go of the collection, fearing that that they would be too far away for Manhattan Beach citizens to see and enjoy. “I’m concerned that once it goes away from town, the only people who would ever go out there are the most dedicated of historians,” said McAulay.
Some have suggested that the collection could be housed in a glass case in the new Manhattan Beach library. Visitors could sift through photocopies, or view the actual collection with assistance from a librarian. County librarian Margaret Todd said she’d ask her staff to look into grant opportunities to fund digitization of the archives. “I’d rather digitize them and have them available that way,” said Todd. “Newspaper is fragile, once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
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