80 years of indexing the news  

The cabinets occupy centre stage on the 3rd floor of the City Library.

The index was begun in the 1930’s with obituaries of New Zealand “worthies” being cut out and pasted into books, but the main driver behind embarking on a newspaper index was the impending New Zealand Centennial Celebrations planned for 1940. A series of publications that covered all aspects of our history and society was proposed but it became evident that very little research had been done, so much work was needed – and quickly. Newspapers were found to be an essential resource because they recorded the everyday life of the country and included much provincial and national government information.

Our index began at this time and plans to celebrate Otago’s centennial in 1948 gave further impetus to such a project. By 1946 there was an index covering the Otago Daily Times 1861-1919, and the library was committed to indexing the daily editions of both the Otago Daily Times and the Evening Star. The bones of the index were provided by several books covering Otago and Dunedin history. At this time, the indexing of the newspapers covered the whole of New Zealand – including information about Auckland but we eventually reduced our indexing to concentrate on Otago and Southland.

In 1992 the card index was closed off and a new era began with an online newspaper index. When we stopped adding to the card catalogue there were more than 250,000 cards representing approximately 750,000 entries! These cards have now been digitized and are being transcribed through a crowd-sourcing project which is well underway. This project is providing volunteers with some interesting challenges trying to decipher many styles of handwriting.

These days our index is called the Southern Regional News Index and has become an online resource accessible via our library catalogue. The digitized card index can be accessed through the Scattered Seeds online archive.

When I first met the index in the 1970’s, we were still handwriting cards – now part of my job is to index the current Otago Daily Times so that it can be entered onto the Southern Regional News Index. Our focus is still our region and our people and is still a major resource for staff doing reference work, and helping patrons with their questions. It is also widely used by researchers outside the region.