Extra, extra! Read all about getting UM-Dearborn history online

In 1965, a Michigan Civil Rights Commission hearing took place on campus regarding racist materials that then-Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard was posting on City of Dearborn bulletin boards. The mayor did not show up at the hearing — but he did speak candidly to the student newspaper.

In a Jan. 20, 1965 article, Hubbard admitted to putting the items on the bulletin board and called the members of the commission, “a pathetic group. They seem to be a bunch of dreamers with a budget of $500,000 of taxpayer money and a staff of about 40 employees who . . . are looking for problems.”

UM-Dearborn Assistant Archivist Hannah Zmuda has been looking through 60-plus years of UM-Dearborn student newspapers recently and this interview was among the many eye-catching articles that she’s read. “I’ve learned so much about campus and the community from reading the student newspaper. We have well over 1,000 papers,” she says. “We might see the past as a foreign country, but we can use it to see ways that student concerns are both the same and different or how they’ve evolved.”

Through a $25,000 grant from the U-M Inclusive History Project, Zmuda is working to make UM-Dearborn’s student newspaper available online and searchable for the public. She was hired in June 2024 and previously did archive work for the Theodore Roosevelt Center and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

She lists off university newspaper article topics she finds amusing — like student smoking rooms in the 1970s, classified ads promoting “reasonably priced” typists to write papers and student opinions about the library being too loud. “I’ve learned that students have been complaining about noise in the library since it opened,” Zmuda says with a laugh. “I guess some things never change.”

On more serious topics, student reporters met with divisive figures like Hubbard, attended discussions with two Watergate defendants who came to campus in the early 1980s and covered protest efforts around a Michigan House of Representatives bill to separate the Dearborn campus from the University of Michigan in 1970. 

The digitization project has been in the works since mid-2024 and is scheduled to be available to the public by December, Zmuda says. The project will be featured at the IHP Summit, which will take place on April 4 at UM-Dearborn. It is a free event and the public is welcome. Interested? Register here.

Zmuda, whose three-year UM-Dearborn archiving appointment was made possible by a separate grant from the IHP, says she’s organizing the university’s archive — which is on the first floor of the Mardigian Library — and found several iterations of the campus paper, which started publication in 1963. It was called The Dearborn Wolverine in the early 1960s and then Ad Hoc from 1965 until it was renamed as the Michigan Journal in 1971. The Michigan Journal is still in publication.

Zmuda also found student papers in the archive that offered points of view or events that were not covered in the university’s flagship paper, such as The Black Emblem. Published in 1975, it provided more extensive coverage of marginalized groups like disabled veterans and people of color and highlighted more faculty work that promoted equity.

Zmuda says university newspapers give insight into the student voice that other materials, such as annual reports or Board of Regents meeting notes, cannot. “Those are important too, but newspapers were published so regularly — and they were intended to be ephemeral and fleeting — that you end up getting a lot more of a holistic look at a place and time,” she says. “Looking at the Michigan Journal, it’s the most complete and granular documentation of campus life that we have. I look at the Michigan Journal as being one of the few times that we have student voices in the archives in a really consistent, strong and expansive way.”

The IHP grant is also supporting digitization of Lyceum, the student creative arts journal that launched in 1971 and is still published today. 

Senior Associate Librarian Holly Sorscher says the library is thrilled to be working on this project. More than a decade ago, before Sorscher worked at UM-Dearborn, the Journal was digitized through the HathiTrust Digital Library, a large-scale digital repository that is co-owned and co-managed by research libraries around the world and administered by U-M. But after the Michigan Journal digitization was complete, library staff learned that access to the papers would be limited. HathiTrust’s materials, which were scanned in by Google through an agreement during the digital library’s early years, fell under copyright restrictions set by Google.

“It has become apparent after many, many iterations of trying to figure this out, that all of those items that are digitized in HathiTrust were not available to the public and, if you did get access, it’s not searchable by phrase or context,” says Sorscher, who notes that the UM-Dearborn team has worked extensively with the University of Michigan Library Copyright Office on the current project. “We realized that the only way we're going to get campus history from the Michigan Journal out there is if we re-digitize the entire thing and put it somewhere where it's accessible. We needed money to be able to do that. Through this Inclusive History Project grant, we were able to get money to hire Hannah for a three-year term. And then, through IHP, we were able to get money to digitize again.”

Sorscher says the recent project has been a collaborative effort with U-M Library staff and a copy of the digital papers will be available on the UM-Ann Arbor Digital Collections Library. But the UM-Dearborn archive will have a copy of the records and the Mardigian Library will retain control and ownership.

Both Sorscher and Zmuda say they know the demand is out there for the articles and photos in these papers that document nearly all of the university’s history. They have gotten requests from athletic teams for old photos, alums looking for past articles and faculty members who are in search of news items for research purposes. And now they have a way to get that information easily out to the UM-Dearborn community and beyond. 

“We want our students, alums and community members, past and future, to have access to this archive. We want them to be able to look back and check out the years when they were here and what was happening at that time,” Sorscher says. “We are grateful to IHP and everyone that’s been involved with this. It’s a project that’s been a decade in the making and it feels magical to know that we are finally going to be able to publicly share this amazing resource.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

U-M staff and students assisting with the project include Bentley Historical Library Lead Archivist for Digital Imaging and Infrastructure Matt Adair, Mardigian Library Systems Administrator Patrick Armatis, Bentley Historical Library Digital Curation Archivist Elena Colón-Marrero, UM-Ann Arbor Digital Content and Collections Director Kat Hagedorn, Michigan Journal Editor Kalaia Jackson, UM-Ann Arbor Digital Conversion Resources Assistant Keith Larsen, Stamelos Gallery Center Registrar Autumn Muir, UM-Ann Arbor Digital Conversion Supervisor Lara Unger and UM-Ann Arbor Digital Conversion Production Manager Larry Wentzel.