Historical Newspaper Collection
The library is digitizing our historical newspaper collection. Almost every issue we hold between 1864 and 1985 has been scanned, converted into machine-readable format (OCR’d), and made available on the internet. We are currently working on the issues for 1986-1994.
You can read and search full issues of The Berrien County Record and other Buchanan newspapers. Click the links below to view issues by date.
It is easy to access individual newspaper issues on the web, but there is no efficient way to do an online search of the entire newspaper collection. However, our in-house public computers allow users to perform simple or sophisticated searches for the years 1869-1935, and soon to be the entire newspaper collection, using built-in Adobe software. Depending on your needs, it may be worth the trip.
You can use the "Search" box at the top right of the web page as a starting point for searching the newspapers, but as it searches the entire library website, and there are no advanced options, it is not very efficient. Most likely many pages of search results will display, and you can't always see the context of the word or phrase.
But to see an example, type in the website search box “St. Joseph Valley Railroad” . The first result will most likely be this paragraph on this web page. The following results will likely be from from the Library’s online newspaper collection, with 10 results per page and many pages. You'll see a brief paragraph from where the word or phrase was found.
Click on a linked page or attachment title, which will take you to the list of PDFs for that year, and the issue should have a box around it. Click that linked issue to open the PDF, then type Control F and put in your search term again. Hit enter and the computer will highlight the term. Hit enter again for the next occurrence of your search term. If your term doesn’t come up, type in a shorter or different part of your original search phrase and hit enter again.
For more in depth searches, it may be worth your time to come into the library and use the public computers to search with Adobe's index search options.