If you want to look into Crookston and Polk County’s past or learn more about the world from the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Crookston Public Library can take you on a trip to the past with its digital microfilm reader. The library received the reader in early 2020 and has an extensive collection of microfilm filled with articles from many local newspapers.
“Back in the day, they used to put old newspapers on what we called microfilm. Also, back then, it used to be in slides, but now, we have a reader that we received two or three years ago, which is now digitized, so you see it on a computer screen now,” Crookston librarian Jane Berg explained. “We still have the newspapers on microfilm, we have the Crookston Daily Times going all the way from 1885 to 2005, so we have that available for anybody needing to find family history, an obituary, or any local history. We have that one microfilm.”
Other newspapers the library has include the Polk County Weekly Journal, the Crookston Weekly Press, the UMC Bi-Weekly College paper, Polk County Weekly Reader, and the Crookston Weekly Tribune when it was in print in the late 1800s. Some of the publications cover different periods from the others (such as the Crookston Weekly Times covering from 1885 to 1923, the Crookston Morning Times covering from 1904 to 1910, and the Crookston Daily Times covering from 1891 to 2005), with each reel covering about three to five months of history.
Even though the microfilms contain local newspapers, the papers cover local, national, and international events during the times to allow people to see some of the responses and how media covered major events around the world and in Crookston.
“Out of curiosity, I pulled the microfilm during the Titanic sinking, and the Crookston Daily Times covered it. They received information from the National News, and it was on their front page,” Berg explained. “That’s just an example of what you can find, snippets of history, not of just local news but of national and international news as well.”
Similar to how you can search for a specific title or author of a book in the library, the library has a system in place to help anyone using the reader to find a film reel that holds an article of a certain event or the obituary of a certain person they’re looking for by using a program known as Project Mastertimes to find the exact date in any of the publications.
Unlike books at the library, the reels cannot be checked out, but they can be accessed with the help of any librarian at the Crookston Public Library during the library’s hours and will assist you in finding any reel you’re looking for. However, the library would like to remind everyone that the reels aren’t the only source of information they have available for people to learn about local history.
“We also have plat books here, old yearbooks from the Crookston High School and the Aggie going back to the late 1800s and early 1900s,” said Berg. “We also have Crookston City Directories, so if you’re looking for any directory information or history of Polk County in general, we have many items available for anybody to see within the library, free of charge, and you don’t need a library card to do so.”
Pictures of the microfilm reader in use can be seen below-
