Statement on Harmful Language and Content in Newspaper Collections

The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) is a portal to millions of freely available newspaper articles published from 1859 to present day. The nature of historical materials, including newspaper content, often reflects biases and stereotypes towards people of color, people that identify as LGBTQ, and people from other marginalized communities; attitudes; beliefs and perspectives of the newspaper and often some members of their community during the time of publication. As such, some of the beliefs reflected are not consistent with current values and practices and users may find some of the material offensive and/or harmful.

The CHNC and our partners digitize historic newspapers to preserve and make available the historical record of our community. However we do not condone any harmful and offensive content that may be found in this collection, and we have a strong belief in and commitment to furthering equity, diversity, and inclusivity. We seek to balance the preservation of this history with sensitivity to how these materials are presented to and perceived by users.

We acknowledge we have a long way to go, but we actively work to share the stories of underrepresented communities in the CHNC. By doing this we hope to provide equal and equitable access to a comprehensive history that will allow users to juxtapose the dominant, establishment perspective of the historic mainstream news with underrepresented perspectives from Asian, Black, Latinx, Native American, LGBTQ and other communities also found within the CHNC. We believe that providing access to Colorado’s broad historical record is important for teaching, learning, research, and social change.

What can be done if CHNC content is found to be harmful or offensive? CHNC enables users to control the titles that are displayed in the search results through their own interaction with the collection. Registered users can simply log into their administrative account, navigate to “Restrict Titles” and choose from the available drop down menu of all titles within the collection.

• This topic was modified 3 years ago by Regan.