If you visit www.wanderer.com these days, you will notice a new feature under our archives section: the blue “archive” tab in the upper-right of the homepage.
Now readers can access copies of The Wanderer dating all the way back to our very first edition on July 24, 1992.
Once inside the online archive, one can simply click on a year and scroll through time and the history of the Tri-Town.
Years ago when the Mattapoisett Library and the Historical Society procured grants to digitally archive past issues of The Presto Press, The Wanderer Editor Paul Lopes decided to contact the Boston Public Library where they perform the digitizing for archive.org, a nonprofit digital archive of print media.
From 2004 up to the present, all back issues of The Wanderer have been saved in digital format. The prior 12 years of issues, though, were only in print with no PDFs. There was some extensive water damage to The Wanderer’s hardcopy archive a few years ago, so the search began to find undamaged copy to be digitized, and even two back issues that had disappeared completely – from The Wanderer vault and the public library.
“Fortunately, we were actually able to recreate them using some old digital files,” said Lopes. “Now we’ve added all the old issues to The Wanderer online archive so that we could give an entire sweep of The Wanderer history.”
Clicking on any of the past editions under the archive tab now brings you directly to that particular website on archive.org.
The Wanderer is approaching its 25th year serving the Tri-Town, and we look forward to another 25….
By Jean Perry