NewsBank has launched its first digital release from the archives of South Africa’s Rand Daily Mail – an historic event for researchers worldwide. The Mail – renowned for its controversial yet courageous journalism, especially its open opposition to apartheid – was closed in 1985.
Now, through a joint partnership between Times Media Group and NewsBank, the pages will be made available to subscribing libraries and institutions beginning with the year 1985 and working backward.
NewsBank archival production experts will carefully handle a total of 820 rolls of film representing approximately 500,000 pages of important South African history. The end result will be a fully searchable digital version of the archive.
“It's exciting to know that with digitization the Rand Daily Mail's treasure store of information about crucial years in the old South Africa will now be more widely available,” says Benjamin Pogrund, who as African Affairs Reporter covered the issues and events that profoundly impacted South Africa’s black population, including the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.
Despite significant pressure from the conservative government, Mail writers openly addressed issues that white readers knew little about. In 1976, Helen Zille uncovered Steve Biko’s murder at the hands of police while in their custody; in 1978, Mervyn Rees and Chris Day broke the news about the apartheid state trying to influence opinion, and expose that sparked the “information scandal” (also known as “Muldergate”).
Decades later, this title is being offered as a fully searchable online resource of great value to scholars. The addition of the Rand Daily Mail enhances NewsBank’s South African News Archive, the largest collection of South African historical and current newspapers from 1798–today.
"We are thrilled to be launching South Africa’s Rand Daily Mail,” says Tim Russell, Vice President, International Division for NewsBank. “Making the Rand Daily Mail archives available online opens exciting new pathways to research South African history, especially during a turbulent period. This critically acclaimed newspaper contains a wealth of unique perspectives within its reporting on 20th-century South Africa.”
The digitization project is expected to take about seven months, with the first sections of the collection available to libraries for purchase Monday. With searchable, full-text coverage from 1902 through 1985, users will be able to search all of the newspaper’s articles, as well as advertisements, editorials, cartoons, and photographs that illuminate South African history in unprecedented ways.
About NewsBank: NewsBank, inc. has been a premier information provider for more than 40 years, with comprehensive resources that meet the diverse research needs of public libraries, colleges and universities, schools, military and government libraries, and professionals around the world.
NewsBank consolidates current and archived information from thousands of newspaper titles, as well as newswires, Web editions, blogs, videos, broadcast transcripts, business journals, periodicals, government documents and other publications. Using these online resources, researchers in libraries around the world can easily utilize tens of millions of current and archived news articles and obituaries.
For more information, please contact: Michelle Leon, Regional Manager: South Africa, +2711 485 5591, mleon@newsbank.com
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