front page of the nov. 20, 1964, collegian owl student newspaper featuring the headline modern library awaits students and a photograph of the new library tower

More than 50 years of the college’s student newspaper can be found in the California Digital Newspaper Database.

Online database now features archived Clarion editions

More than 1,000 issues of Citrus College's student newspaper have been archived online, thanks to a collaboration between faculty and staff of the college's journalism program, Hayden Memorial Library and the Citrus College Foundation.

The project began during spring 2018 when Patrick Schmiedt, journalism instructor, approached Sarah Bosler, public services librarian, with the idea of digitizing the archived print copies of the Clarion.

Together, they applied for a College of Completion Innovation Grant from the Foundation. When they received the grant a few months later, Mr. Schmiedt and Ms. Bosler selected vendors to digitize and host the collection.

"Adjunct librarian Sandy Krause worked with four other part-time librarians and a student worker to compile a complete inventory of the newspaper archive from both the library's collection and the journalism program's collection," Ms. Bosler explained. "Librarians created a spreadsheet and counted everything, making notes of missing issues and pages, as well as problems, like brittle paper. They then boxed up the best copies of the newspapers and mailed them off for high-resolution scanning."

According to Ms. Bosler, a total of 9,461 pages, or 1,031 issues, were sent to Backstage Library Works in December 2018 for scanning.

This process was completed in April 2019, at which point the Foundation awarded a second grant that enabled the team to complete the archiving process with the California Digital Newspaper Collection.

In September 2020, the archive went live at on the Citrtus College Library's LibGuides database.

Visitors to the website can search issues of the Clarion published from 1964 through 2018.

"It is very exciting that the Citrus College Clarion archives are now available online," said the college superintendent/president. "This project has provided the college community and the public with direct access to 50 years of institutional and local history, told from the student perspective. The online archive will undoubtedly be a valuable resource for many student journalists."

This article originally appeared in the November 2020 edition of the Citrus View.