This post was largely discovered and written by your friendly neighborhood librarian, Ralph Courtney. Thanks, Ralph!

Big news! The Consortium Library has increased access to Anchorage news sources through the Anchorage Daily News database!

We’ve been accustomed to only having access to the Anchorage Daily News (in all its varied manifestations) back to 1985, and most of that only included articles generated by the ADN itself, without any wire service stories or articles borrowed from other major newspapers, or even – horrors! – the comics. The only exception has been since October 2018, when full-color scanned images began to be available.

Well, whoa! I’m not sure when this started, but I am sure it was very recently: there are now five choices instead of four when you select the ADN database, and now there are two ‘Image’ choices under ‘Format’ rather than just the ‘2018-Current’ that we’ve been used to. There is ALSO 1970-2018! And these really are full-page scans that close the scanned-full-page gap (and more!) between the closing of the Anchorage Times in 1992 through 2018 and beyond. (There’s still 1947 or so through 1969 to go for the ADN, although I have no knowledge as to whether that’s being done or not.) This is really tremendous!

I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware that between the Anchorage Daily Times and the ADN, we now have this magnificent stretch of online full-page day-to-day Anchorage and Alaska history reaching from the present day all the way back to 1916, something long dreamed of but thought nearly impossible to afford and accomplish as recently as five years ago.