Help Us Digitize the Rocky Mountain News

Do you have any old print issues of the Rocky Mountain News?

A few years ago, we began a project to digitize the Rocky Mountain News from start to finish (1859-2009). We have digitized more than six decades so far, but we could use your help to ensure the finished product is as comprehensive and useful as possible. Read on to see how you can support this work!

The Project

For a century and a half, and for many generations of Coloradans, the Rocky Mountain News was the news source of record. Following the closure of the newspaper in 2009,  the Denver Public Library was fortunate to acquire the newspaper’s archival records,  their “photo morgue” and reporters’ clipping files, and, perhaps most importantly, the library also received the copyright to the paper’s contents.

In 2020, Denver Public Library and the Colorado State Library embarked on an ambitious project to digitize the entire run of the Rocky Mountain News. The State Library is making them available for free in their Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC). We’ve made great headway with both the Daily Rocky Mountain News and Weekly Rocky Mountain News, and we’ll work with our partners to continue adding years all the way through the end of publication in  2009.

How You Can Help

That’s where you come in. We have print copies up to 1946, and an entire run of the paper on microfilm. The little reels of microfilm are what our customers still use today to access the stories they need. We are scanning our print issues of the paper for the digitization project, but our physical copies of the Rocky stop after December 31, 1946. We can digitize from microfilm, but we know from experience that digital images of print issues are more visually appealing and much more useful for researchers. As CHNC has said, "New and improved scans = improved OCR text = an improved search experience."

Can you help us fill in the gaps in our print holdings? If you have any issues of the Rocky Mountain News from 1947 to 2009, hit that Contact Us button and let us know! We’d love to borrow them for scanning, to ensure that what we’re making available are the best visual versions possible. 

Let’s make this piece of Colorado history accessible for free for all Coloradans!