An archive of Swedish-language newspapers at Augustana College is now available to the public online as part of a digitization project recently completed in collaboration with the National Library of Sweden, the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, and the American Swedish Institute.
The Swedish American Newspapers Project offers digital copies of hundreds of Swedish-language newspapers published in North America from the 1850s to the early 2000s. The free, searchable archive contains more than 1.3 million digitized pages from 348 individual publications.
The core of the original newspaper collections are preserved at Augustana College’s Swenson Swedish American Research Center in Rock Island.
The newspapers provided a vital connection for North America’s Swedish immigrant communities to their home country, said the center’s director and honorary Professor of Swedish American Studies, Dag Blanck.
“[W]e are so used nowadays to instant communication and the internet, being able to click on newspapers from all over the world and websites and so forth. That was of course not possible then, so these newspapers became extremely— an extremely important source of information if you wanted to know what was going on in the old country,” said Blanck.
Another aspect, according to Blanck, is that newspapers gave immigrants a place to learn more about their adopted homeland.
“For example, many of them became citizens and could vote, participate in the political process, but the political system in Sweden and the United States are quite different from each other, and many of these immigrants knew very little about the American political processes,” Blanck said. “So these newspapers were very important in first explaining how the political system worked, when it was time to vote, what is voting for Congress, what is voting for president, and the local elections, all of that.
“And then also in encouraging them to vote for certain candidates. So it's a very interesting material, and you can learn about how these immigrants are socialized into American society and especially into the political aspects of American society. And you can follow the political debates within the immigrant community going on in Swedish. There are ads in Swedish for different political candidates and so forth.”
The publications also provided a window into learning about how fellow immigrants were doing in other parts of America. “And so that became an important way of maintaining a cohesion within the immigrant community,” Blanck said. “And towards the— in the beginning of the 20th century, when there are lots of advertisements and pictures in the newspapers, you can see lots about consumer culture as there are ads for different types of products and that the Swedish Americans that were after, wanted to buy, so to speak. And then you can see in agricultural communities and lots of ads for agricultural products and so forth. And in the urban areas, of course, a very different scene.”
Blanck said there were between 500 and 600 Swedish publications in the United States between 1850 and the early 2000s.
“Augustana College subscribed to all of these newspapers because Augustana College was a part of this Swedish-American community,” Blanck said. “So Augustana College developed a collection of Swedish-language newspapers, and there was a great interest also in Sweden in these newspapers. The National Library of Sweden, the Royal Library, as it is called, [has] as a mandate to collect everything that's printed in Swedish, and all that material is kept at the Royal Library in Stockholm.”
The 12-year project was a group effort. The National Library of Sweden, Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul and the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis also contributed to the project.
“So over the years, an enormously good collection of Swedish language newspapers and other Swedish language imprints, books, pamphlets, etc., was created in Stockholm at the Royal Library because of this connection between Augustana and the Royal Library,” Blanck said. “Every year there was a big crate of Swedish language newspapers and other publications shipped from Rock Island to Stockholm. And those newspapers were preserved in Stockholm and were used by scholars who were interested in the Swedish language press and in the Swedish-American community and were microfilmed in the 1950s and '60s.”
The process of digitizing, in some cases, century-old papers was difficult, he said.
“And many of the newspapers that were kept here in Rock Island were not in terribly good shape, or they were not in shape good enough for digitizing, it turns out, because they had been used and they had been preserved in the climate of Western Illinois. The humidity in particular is very bad for newspaper paper, and unless you have them in climate-controlled areas, and of course, we did not,” Blanck said. He noted the technology improved over the decades and many papers sent to Stockholm were preserved.
“We had to kind of search around and find the copies of the newspaper that were in the best condition. And these papers that had been shipped to Sweden — they had been preserved there, but not in a climate-controlled area, but they had been preserved in fairly good conditions” Blanck said. “So that's why we decided to digitize from those newspapers, from that set of newspapers. But it's a real challenge to preserve, especially newspapers. It's brittle, and it deteriorates quickly.”
He estimates the total cost of digitizing at well over two million dollars, mostly funded by grants and shared among the four organizations.
Anyone interested in reading these publications can find them on the Minnesota Historical Society’s website.
“[S]o that they are digitally available online and they are keyword searchable so that you can type in a word or a name or something into the database and then you get a long list of every hit that it comes up with whenever that word is mentioned in these newspapers. It's a tremendous resource, and it changes the way you can use these resources, these papers,” Blanck said.
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