About The Argonaut
The Argonaut is the award winning student newspaper produced by the University of Idaho Student Media in the Department of Student Involvement. Continuously in print since 1898, it was historically published twice a week during the academic year and distributed across campus and throughout Moscow, Idaho and Pullman, Washington. Recently, daily Argonaut publishing has moved to their online edition, while continuing to print limited special issues.
The pages of The Argonaut are a treasure trove of university happenings, opinions and local advertisements, offering a fascinating glimpse into the details of the past century of campus life. The Argonaut Student Newspaper digital collection complements the Gem of the Mountain Yearbook Collection, Campus Photograph Collection, and University of Idaho Historical Photograph Collection to illustrate the rich history of University of Idaho.
At a meeting of the student body in the school year of ‘98-‘99, it was decided to publish a college paper… The new paper was christened “The Argonaut, the Searcher of the Golden Fleece.”
About The Collection
This digital collection provides access to over 6,500 issues of the Argonaut from 1898 to 2021 in PDF format. For current articles, please visit the Argonaut website or their Issuu page.
The files for issues from 1898 - 2010 were created by digitizing the microfilm copies held by University of Idaho Library. The PDFs have transcripts produced by Optical Character Recognition, allowing the full text to be searched. Due to the low resolution of the microfilm source, the quality of these items is variable.
Issues since Fall 2010 are born digital PDFs created by Argonaut staff during their publishing routine. The files are transferred to the Library for preservation and access on a regular basis.
In addition to searchable full text, descriptive metadata was provided by a partial index originally created by library staff to provide access to the physical microfilm collections. In Spring 2020 (during Covid closures) a team of students reviewed all items without metadata, adding descriptions and subjects to enhance access. We would like to acknowledge the work of Dakota, Edie, Gwen, Kritika, Valerie, Alisa Melior, Kit Stokes, and Kevin Dobbins on preparing and enhancing this collection, as well as the assistance of past Student Media Manager Tara Roberts and numerous Argonaut student staff members over the years.
Student media serves as a focal point for student life among UI Students. We provide important forums for the exchange of ideas and opinions, information about events and news of general interest about the campus, region, nation and the world.
Technical
This website was created by U of I Library's Digital Initiatives using the open source static site generator Jekyll (project source code is available). It was one of the earliest prototypes of a static web approach to digital collections that has grown into the CollectionBuilder project developed at the Library. News highlights on the home page are laid out using Metafizzy's Packery. We appreciate and value the open source community that makes these tools available to the world!
