Community Newspapers Collection

This is a pilot project of Archives & Special Collections at the University of Windsor's Leddy Library to reinstate the former INK Newspaper Project for local newspapers. INK was one of several initiatives of Knowledge Ontario (KO) and helped highlight the incredible value of digitized newspapers for history and research. The newspaper titles here originate mostly in Essex County and the Municipality of Chatham-Kent in Ontario, Canada. Several of the titles have been rescanned using macrophotography, and much of the imagery is improved, but many of the sources come from microfilm and the quality can still be highly variable.

INK had many titles that continue to be available online, and priority has been given to content that would be otherwise unavailable. All titles have been processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and an image rendition as well as a searchable/printable PDF is available for each page from the Viewer via the Download links on the lower left-hand side of the screen. More information is available on the history of each newspaper and the amount of digitization that has occurred by using the links on the title list.

Almost every community has had some level of local newspaper publishing, it is our hope that this heritage can be surfaced and shared. Please note that this is a very modest web server and that this service may be shut down at any time. We welcome partners who wish to contribute to this effort!