The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado's oldest newspaper and the news source for generations of Coloradans. Founded during the 1859 Colorado Gold Rush by William Byers, the paper closed its doors in 2009, just two months before its 150th anniversary. Shortly after closing, Scripps Howard finalized an agreement that would transfer the Rocky’s voluminous archives, photo morgue, and copyright to DPL "to ensure responsible stewardship of the storied newspaper's archives and artifacts." For decades, Denver Public Library has acquired and made available diverse materials from the Rocky, including thousands of back issues in print, digital images by Rocky photographers, the newspaper’s working files of clippings and photos, and comprehensive microfilm of the paper’s complete run.
From 2022 to 2026, the Denver Public Library worked in close partnership with the Colorado State Library to digitize the Denver Public Library’s holdings of print and microfilm papers and make them freely accessible via the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.
This platform allows for comprehensive access to the paper, including the complete run of the Daily Rocky Mountain News and significant portions of the Weekly Rocky Mountain News. Millions of pages were scanned, made keyword searchable through optical character recognition, and uploaded to the web platform thanks to an initial donation by former City Librarian Harry Sherouse and sustained funding from the Denver Public Library Fund.
Digitized print issues from 1859 to 1946 form the core of this collection, allowing for crisp, easily read (and searched) text. Wherever possible, later issues were also scanned from print allowing for full color illustrations.
Included in the Rocky archives at Denver Public Library is a massive collection of photographs in digital, print, and negative formats. Digital access to these photographs grows continuously through digitization of physical materials and enhancement of metadata for born digital materials.
In 2014, Denver Public Library added nearly 300,000 digital images to the online collection, including photographs of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and Pulitzer-winning photographs from Columbine: Images of Tragedy, Colorado on Fire, and Final Salute. These photographs were generally made during the last decade of the paper’s run (1999-2009) and showcase everything from dramatic stories to festivals to mundane and environmental or background images. Because these photos were added using only their original metadata, please note that some photos lack descriptive information and sometimes dates in the records are incorrect.
Additionally, the Library has digitized some photographic prints from the paper’s collection of photographic prints to make them digitally available as well. These are primarily black-and-white photographs taken by Rocky Mountain News staff photographers during the last half of the 20th century.
In addition to the almost 300,000 digital images acquired by the Library, there are also some 2,500 boxes in the archival collection, with most items dating from 1950-2000. About 500 boxes contain photographs and negatives, organized alphabetically in subseries by name and subject. The collection includes over 1,000 boxes of news article clippings published in the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post and other newspapers, also organized by name and subject.
The library also holds Rocky Mountain News negatives dating from 1937, 1940-1975, from an acquisition in the 1970s. These negatives are organized by date.