The Kansas City Star has collaborated with the Kansas City Public Library to launch an online database of its pre-digital era photo archives. Anyone can search through the archives at KCStarPhotos.org.
This has been a project years in the making, Kansas City Star deputy editor Derek Donovan told KCUR, that highlights generations of photos from throughout the 20th century.
"This is a huge chunk of Kansas City's history that has been basically completely out of the public's eye forever because we just didn't have the wherewithal to be able to make it available," he said. "We had, you know, just these hundreds of thousands of envelopes that were full of these photographs, and they were just sitting here completely mute because nobody had scanned them, nobody had been able to get them out there."
While the move provides access to photos of newsmakers and other prominent figures, it also releases photos of everyday people in Kansas City who were featured in the Star's journalism.
"The thing that I am the most enthusiastic about is just everyday people finding themselves in, you know, in the annals of how this city has progressed through the years," Donovan said. "It's a really cool thing when you decide to do a search and you find, hey, look, here's my childhood friend who happened to have been pictured when she was, you know, out roller skating."
- Derek Donovan, deputy editor at The Kansas City Star
