Digging into the city's history — and your own — has become incredibly easy thanks to the Fall River Public Library’s initiative to digitize its collection of newspaper microfilm. 

The library’s reference department has been quietly uploading decades worth of Herald News pages online — complete copies of every page, every story, every ad, with all the text searchable. In the past week, the library’s latest batch of editions came online at fallriver.advantage-preservation.com, digitized by Advantage Archives. It comes to more than 310,000 pages of Fall River and national history from 1926 to 1968.  

It’s the first time that Fall River newspapers from this era have been freely online and searchable. 

“It's a free site,” said Conor Murray of the library’s reference department. “There’s no paywall or anything.” 

Those with a nose for news archives — historians, researchers, genealogists, or those just curious about their past — may know that it’s been difficult to access most of Fall River’s newspapers from the 20th century. 

You can read more in an article by Dan Medeiros published in The Herald News at: http://tinyurl.com/4kcsazcx.