Rediscovering Scholarly Newsletters: A Challenge

Back in 2009, Andrew Reinhard, then at Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.  serialized the republication online of  The Pompeiiana Newsletter:

The Pompeiiana Newsletter was created and edited by Bernard Barcio and ran from 1974 through 2003. Pompeiiana offered a place for Latin students to publish comics, stories, games, and articles, and was a beloved resource for Latin teachers. In 2008, Barcio granted Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers the rights for all of Pompeiiana. This blog will make all 229 issues freely available to Latin teachers, students, and others interested in Classics, one issue per day.

In August 2013, the Medieval Sai Project: The Greek Norwegian Archaeological Mission to Sudan began the serialized republication of the 22 issues of Nubian Letters published between 1983 and 1994:

Nubian Letters in an independent biannual bulletin for Nubian history and archaeology, published under the auspices of the International Society for Nubian Studies and the Department of Early Christian Art at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands.

Edited by Elizabeth de Ranitz and Karel Inemmée.

I'm really pleased to see these newsletters in general circulation. They represent a form of semi-formal scholarly communication which was common in the second half of the 20th century (and earlier), but which was never properly collected by libraries. Even those which have made the leap to digital media (and you can find many be searching the keyword "newsletter" in AWOL), remain mostly poorly curated or uncollected in libraries. They are nevertheless an extraordinarily important resource for the history of the disciplines they cover and the institutions and projects they represent.

In the Summer of 2014 Oriental Institute Research Archivist, Bibliographer Foy Scalf, began to scan the hard copies of the Oriental Institute Staff Newsletter (63 issues edited by me which appeared between February 1998 and March 2005) and upon discovering that they were incomplete, urged me to try to recover the lost files from a ten year old laptop. As a consequence we now have a complete set available. So a small piece of Oriental Institute microhistory is now recovered and preserved. They are available at Oriental Institute Staff Newsletter, and further information is at the OI History Blog.

Beginning in February 1998, with the encouragement and support of Gene Gragg who was then Director of the Oriental Institute, I compiled, edited and distributed by email an internal newsletter for the staff of the Oriental Institute. It chronicled the activities of the departments of the OI, and of individual scholars and senior students at the OI. It was distributed widely in the University of Chicago community by means of a listhost mailing list, but its archive was not publicly available.  

Many scholars keep files of these things, which they get by virtue of memberships in societies or organization, or association with projects, and in other ways. Likewise, many projects, association, and societies hold files of them in their archives, or in their archives of their successor or sponsoring institutions. If you have a files of one of these inaccessible newsletters, or know of one, I challenge you to follow in the footsteps of The Pompeiiana Newsletter, Nubian Letters, and The Oriental Institute Staff Newsletter and make it available to your colleagues and the world at large. It is simple to set up a blog at Blogger, Wordpress or Tumblr (or one of many other comparable tools), to scan an issue a day, and post them online. Please make sure that you get, or make a good faith effort to get, permission from the organization or person who published the newsletter in the first place.  

Since then a couple of additional newsletters have emerged:

This past year I scanned and posted Pirradaziš: Bulletin of Achaemenian Studies I produced in the 1990s.

Pirradaziš (Pirradazish) [OCLC Number: 863381899] is a newsletter produced by Charles E. Jones at the Oriental Institute Chicago. Eight issues appeared between 1990 and 1994.

Pirradaziš seeks to gather information, primarily bibliographical, which relates to the study of the Achaemenid Persian empire, as well as relevant material on the periods immediately preceding and following it. Each issue will cover the material seen by the editor during the six months (more or less) prior to the date of issue.

Also in 2015, colleagues at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World scanned and made available copies of the orphaned Circle of  Inner Asian Art and Archaeology Newsletter as a component of the relaunched Ancient World Digital Library.

Please let me know if you can participate, and what and where you efforts appear so I can include it in AWOL's List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

And I'll happily offer advice and assistance in how to go about doing it If you'd rather have me do it, and can supply the hard copy, I'll gladly make that happen as well.