While archives have been viewed as unbiased repositories of the past in its entirety, they are in fact spaces of gaps and silences. These gaps and silences are due to changing opinions of archivists have considered "of enduring value," and can reflect historical, institutional, and internalized racism, classism, sexism, and ignorance of marginalized genders and sexualities. Biases may also impact the archivist's description. Archives are not neutral.
Learn more about how to be a critical user of archives and primary sources.
Online access to San Luis Obispo historic newspapers:
San Luis Obispo newspaper coverage can be searched in several places:
Print and microfilm access to San Luis Obispo County historic newspapers
Tips for searching online:
Please note that you may encounter materials that include offensive, derogatory, and out-of-date perspectives, images, and terms.
The computer uses something called "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) to read scanned text pages. If the original page is hard to read, the computer may not produce good OCR and the text will not be read by the computer correctly. See this example from a scan of the Cal Poly student newspaper:
Sometimes you may not find what you are searching for because the computer did not read the text correctly! Try many different keywords to search if you are not finding what you are looking for.