Carolyn DiPaoloThe Palm Beach County Library System now has digital access to all of the paper’s editions.
More than 100 years of local news and information is now available to anyone with a Palm Beach County Public Library card.
In April, the library system secured perpetual access to electronic copies of The Palm Beach Post from its first issue in 1916 to 2019.
County commissioners approved the $886,000 purchase of the searchable files without discussion on April 21.
The seller wasn’t USA Today Co., which owns The Post. It was NewsBank, the Naples, Fla., company that owns the rights to thousands of news archives, including The Palm Beach Post.
The library system already has access to Post files since 2019, which are continually updated. The complete archives give library patrons an incredible research tool, James Larson, the library’s director of intellectual resources, told Stet News.
It is the culmination of years of effort to ensure reliable and dedicated access to an unmatched historical record.
Love it or hate it — the newspaper documented everything from a reporter’s postwar visit to Morrison Field Army base in October 1945 before it became Palm Beach International Airport to the Jan. 1, 1986, front-page confirmation of President Donald Trump’s long-rumored purchase of Mar-a-Lago.
The database includes The Post’s detailed stories of this area’s growth and development, its culture and politics and even the prices in advertisements.
Michelle Quigley, a librarian at the Canyon Branch west of Boynton Beach, is spreading the word to patrons about the new resource.
“When we tell people it’s there, they’re really pleased and astounded and impressed,” Quigley said. “The big picture is that we, as the library system for Palm Beach County, should have access to the archive of the newspaper of record for Palm Beach County.”
Library leaders said it is important to secure the records now because, with the disruption in legacy news operations, the digital rights to the paper’s stories and photos could be traded among various companies.
For decades, all of the issues of the newspaper were photographed and stored on microfilm, but microfilm is not searchable, and even those images were beginning to degrade.
“We were keen to ensure that the information was preserved,” Larson said. “It’s now reliably available 24/7 to all of our members in an imaged format, and not merely as a text-only database.”
As part of the agreement, the library will own a computer hard drive containing the information.
Because the source of the digital archive is microfilm, all of the pages are in black and white.
There are other ways to see The Palm Beach Post’s historic files, but they require visiting a library or research center or paying a digital service, such as Newspapers.com.
Larson anticipates that access to The Palm Beach Post pages will be popular with local historians, genealogists and students doing research once they discover how much is available.
The purchase does not include archives of the Palm Beach Daily News, which documents happenings on Palm Beach. Library patrons have access to a text archive of Daily News articles from 2000 to the present through NewsBank.
The NewsBank platform is among the library system’s most popular online research tools, Larson said. It accounts for almost 20% of the library’s total digital use, Larson said.
Finding Palm Beach Post archives
Access the resource via the library website’s Online Resources page. Look for the “Access World News (Newsbank)” link or the “Palm Beach Post Collection (Newsbank)” link.
You will be asked to enter your library card number.
If you don’t have a library card, you can get one here.
