Almost 150 years of Inland Empire history is now available to the UC Riverside campus community through the UCR Library.

Last month, the library acquired access to the entire historical contents of the Press-Enterprise newspaper going back to its 1878 start as a weekly publication, known then as the Riverside Press.

The newspaper archives were recently digitized by NewsBank, which offers a global news database of media publications to libraries. The company, which finished the project in the past six months, reached out to the library, letting it know that the collection was available to purchase.

“It was very clear this is something we wanted as the Press-Enterprise is one of the flagship newspapers for the region that specifically deals with the Inland Empire, Riverside, San Bernardino, and the area,” said Erika Quintana, area studies collection strategist for the library.

In addition to managing the library’s foreign language materials, Quintana also oversees its local collections of resources about the Inland Empire. The Press-Enterprise provides an invaluable resource to students and researchers as an integral chronicler of the area’s history and people, Quintana said.

The Riverside Press began publishing eight years after the city of Riverside was founded, according to the Press-Enterprise history on its website. A second newspaper, the Daily Enterprise, started in 1885. The two were eventually combined in 1931. The newspaper went through various owners over the decades and expanded its coverage of the region to where it had a circulation of more than 175,000 in the mid-1990s.

The library has had physical copies of many years of the newspaper’s past issues, mainly in microfilm format, Quintana said. Despite the laborious process involved in searching and viewing microfilm, the Press-Enterprise archives are one of the more heavily used in the format, she said.

With the NewsBank archive, users can search online for headlines, articles, and other content with keywords such as names or topics and pull up articles in text or image format. The database also allows users to search by date, pulling up a particular day’s edition and viewing all content, including photographs and ads.

Quintana said the newspaper records can be used by students and researchers for a range of projects from various disciplines..

“The archive has such great historical content for demographics, for the built environment, for environmental studies,” she said. “I’m hopeful it will have many applications.”

UCR students, faculty, staff, and researchers can access the digital collection here or through UC Library Search. The archive can be accessed on campus or by logging in through the OpenAthens platform or a VPN when off campus.