Explore a new alternative press archive and learn how to engage your audience

Produced by Reveal Digital and powered by Veridian, Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries.

These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Way back in the old days (like 2005!), when many libraries were beginning to digitize their newspaper collections and other cultural heritage material, it was all about preservation and access. That is, the key goal was to get the material digitized and store the digital files in a safe place.

A second goal was to make the digitized material available and searchable online, making it much more accessible to library patrons than ever before.

Those two goals are still absolutely central to the digitization efforts of most libraries, as they should be and as they’ll remain to be.

However, we don’t think that “just digitizing stuff and putting it online” is good enough anymore, and we think most modern libraries agree with us.

The next critical step is audience engagement.

With Veridian we never consider a digitization project to be “finished”. Getting it online is just the first step. After that the collection needs to be nurtured and maintained, it needs to attract visitors and it needs to encourage those visitors to really engage with the content. But how do we achieve this?