A bit about this blog...

Thanks to Google’s News Archive application, a huge volume of back issues from newspapers all over the world is now available on your very own computer screen. For a guy like me with a fondness for both history and newspapers, this has been an exciting development. The process of getting to this information in the past used to be laborious, to say the least.

My own experience involved, first, trudging down to one of the few libraries that had old issues of a limited number of papers. I’d then have to request what issues (on microfiche) I wanted to view from the librarian and, once secured, load them into a creaking microfiche viewer and begin cranking its old leaver around to get to the pages I wanted to see. I’d use the few inches of space in my cubicle not taken up by the monstrosity to scribble down what notes I had to make.

I did this primarily while researching two articles I wrote in the early ’90s, one on the old Pittsburgh Pirates hockey club of the ’20s and another on the team they became, the Philadelphia Quakers. Don’t get me wrong – looking at all those old articles and ads from years ago was a lot of fun. And the bottom line was, with widespread availability of the Internet still a few years away, there was at that time no other way to see the material. If a dog has a small bone and doesn’t know there’s a bigger one over the fence, he’s not upset – just content with what he has. And so was I.

But now, with these archives available to me in the comfort of my own home, accessible on my schedule and not the library’s, I can’t help but look back on those days and marvel at how arcane both the technology and the process were.

Things, of course, still aren’t perfect. More archived newspaper content is coming online, thanks in large part to Google’s efforts to digitize as much of it as they can. And many big papers have been bringing their old content online, but a large number of them still require a fee to view it.

Some papers, though, seem to have welcomed the Google initiative with open arms and have made their back issues available through Google for no charge. By a huge stroke of good luck, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one of them. That basically means I’m now able to start this blog and highlight all the great jewels of Penguins historical information that previously sat locked away in microfiche archives in the ‘Burgh.

I hope everyone enjoys the stuff I link to here. Feel free to let me know your thoughts either by e-mail or through the commenting function at the bottom of each post. I’d love to hear your memories of Penguins hockey!

- Greg