We are happy to report that on Saturday, August 20th, the Chancellor sent the campus an announcement about the size of the book collection to return to the Academic Commons when it opens in December 2012. Based on the analysis done by a faculty committee at the request of the Provost and Chancellor, 50% of the library’s monographic collections will return to the new library. More information about this announcement is available at this DU Today article.

The rest of the Penrose collection will remain in the Hampden Center after the renovation. Any material with a location of “Hampden Stacks”can be requested and delivered to campus in about four hours. To request delivery of a book, just click on the “Request It” button in the catalog record.

Penrose Library has recently acquired the Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers: Perspectives on Day-to-Day Life digital collection which features twenty-five camp newspapers published between 1942 and 1945.  Some representative titles include the Grenada Pioneer, Amache Hi It, Granada Christian Church News, Heart Mountain Sentinel, Manzanar Free Press, Tulean Dispatch, Topaz Times, Poston Chronicle, Minidoka Irrigator, Gila News Courier, Trek, and the Rohwer Outpost. Most of the titles exist in their complete runs and were digitized from the holdings at the Library of Congress.  Although published primarily in English, some newspapers also offer articles in Japanese.

You can browse the complete collection, which is arranged roughly in chronological order, or search within either the collection or a specific document.  The advanced search interface provides searching of the full-text, or by keyword, document title, author, place name, or document number, with options to limit by collection, publication date range, or language.

Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers is just one of sixty-seven specialized historical archival collections available through the Archives Unbound database.  To access the collection, go to the “Databases” tab on the library’s homepage and then either click on “A” to retrieve the database by title (Archives Unbound: Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers), or select the “Archival Resources: Also Useful” category, listed under “Databases by Subject.”  You can also search by the collection’s title in the library catalog.