Opinion: Some tips on searching Hungry Horse News archives
One of the biggest requests we get here at the Hungry Horse News is an archive search. The call typically goes like this: “Back in the 1980s my such and such was in the newspaper. Can I get a copy of it?”
The problem with this request is the newspaper from back then are not in electronic format. They’re only hard copies. So finding a story would take hours and hours of searching through huge bound volumes.
Sorry, we don’t have time for that.
The company is considering digitizing the archives, but that has happened yet and even that will take hundreds of hours of work, maybe even thousands, as each page has to be scanned into a computer and so far, there is no fast way to do that.
But all is not lost, dear readers. If you want to search yourself, the best place is the Columbia Falls library, which has our newspaper archived starting in 1946 on microfilm up until 2013.
After that, we have digital archives of almost all the photos and many of the newspapers (but not all, there have been hard drive failures and system changes, so regrettably, some issues are gone.) Our digital photo archive goes back to about 2003. I say about, because some months in some years are missing, due to the above-mentioned hard drive failures.
The second option is to go to Glacier National Park’s library, where they also have bound volumes you can look through.
We do not allow people to go through our bound volumes at the Hungry Horse News offices anymore. They are fragile and the 1980s in particular (poor paper?) are falling apart.
As for Mel Ruder archives, he gave almost all of his Glacier National Park photos to Glacier Park when he sold the newspaper in 1978.
We have many of his photos that aren’t in Glacier, but often the really interesting ones that appeared in print are gone. His family has some of his best photos in their own archives.
Still, we have a fair amount that we’ve scanned in over the years (we scan in one or two a week), so we can always do a quick search to try to find something.
As for the Brian Kennedy archives (1978-99), like Ruder, when Kennedy sold the newspaper to Lee Enterprises, he took many of his best photos. Still, we have quite a few, but they aren’t early the quality of Ruder’s. Ruder shot 4-by-5 inch negatives, Kennedy shot 35 mm negatives.
A 35 mm negative has to be blown up way more than a 4-by-5 to make a decent print, so they simply don’t come out as well.
Searching the Kennedy archive, like Ruder’s is time consuming, so if you don’t have the EXACT date of publication, we likely can’t find the photo. And even then, we may or not be able to fill your request, as we simply don’t have the staff to do the actual scanning.
Like our bound volumes, we do not allow people to go through Ruder or Kennedy negatives. We’ve simply had too many instances over the years where they’ve been “borrowed” and not returned. We’ve even had people tear out pages from our newspaper books.
To recap, if it’s something that’s happened in the past 20 years, it’s likely in our digital archives that can be quickly searched in-house. At this time, the archive online is more limited. The best way to search online is to simple Google your subject and then add “Hungry Horse News” to the search.
We do it ourselves every week, as it’s the quickest way for us to search our own archive, believe it or not.
As for anything older than 20 years, your best bet is the microfilm at the library.
Good luck with your search.