"I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I'm in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times." -- Will Rogers

The printed word is more reliable than your memory bank when it comes to preserving information. Thank the Sumerians for that! They created the first serious writing with their "cuneiform" alphabet, of about 2000 signs, from 3500 BC to 2000 BC.

Jump ahead to newspapers. I love newspapers! I mean old ones that go back to the founding of our city. Newspapers provide a daily diary of events that took place in a community and are a gold mine for doing historical research.

The first newspapers in Rensselaer County were published in Lansingburgh. There were 20 papers between 1787 and 1875, starting with The Northern Centinel and Lansingburgh Advertiser. Troy had more than 70 newspapers, with the first being the Farmer's Oracle in 1797. Papers were daily, weekly, semi-weekly, or monthly, but they all brought a particular view to their readers. Some were owned or allied by politics, while others were geared for farmers, workers, and even specific ethnic groups.

Old newspapers are important reading since you can obtain a chronological view of the events that shaped Troy as it went from a small mercantile village to huge industrial giant.

Fortunately, many early newspapers have lasted over the years because they were made from rags and are resilient; certainly nothing like the cheap pulp used today. The Chinese invented paper, originally made from hemp, in the second century B.C. It wasn't until 1690 that the first paper-mill was built in America at Germantown, Pa. and it wasn't until 1768 that the first mill started operating in our state at Hempstead, Long Island.

We are fortunate that some folks kept their newspapers and didn't toss them. That's where the New York State Library's Newspaper Project enters the story. Back in 1987, the library began an inventory to find out who had what in old newspapers, so they could compile an inventory and attempt to preserve the contents of New York State's newspaper history. They sent out a survey to libraries, historical societies, archives, and anyone to whom they thought might be holding old newspapers.

The Newspaper Project's director, Jeff Sohn, gave me a tour recently. Located among limited space on two floors of the library (and some satellite offices), a handful of technicians work amidst numerous pallets of old newspapers, waist high. They must carefully separate and examine each page, and even place them in a makeshift humidifier to get the creases out, before they can begin the process of compiling the info and preserving.

Each newspaper page is then microfilmed. As of today, the staff has identified and catalogued 20,773 distinct U.S. newspapers of which 9,623 were published in New York. This has given the library OCLC catalog 63,769 new ocal holding records. They have microfilmed more than 2.8 million pages of New York newspapers since 1991, and that amounts to over 4,000 roles of microfilm. They're not done either! They're forecasting a completion date by 2006 and are working on the New York City area presently.

So far, 56 of New York's 62 counties have been inventoried.

This is one of the most important projects ever undertaken, in my opinion. A major problem for any researcher is access to original material. Some libraries have a handful of titles, while another may have only a few issues of one. This project seeks out and goes where no librarian has gone before: it locates every possible newspaper title, finds out who owns it, borrows them whenever possible, and then microfilms each page..

The library will be a one-stop shop for researchers when the project is completed. They keep a master copy, and provide copies for the public to use. More importantly, if they are holding the master, you can purchase any reel of microfilm for a small fee: $15 to $25 a roll. That beats the steep fee of hundreds of dollars a roll from other sources.

You can view the complete list of microfilmed New York State papers at their Web site at http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/nysnp/. They have many Troy newspapers available for viewing at the library. They also list the locations of those they don't currently possess. Each participating library that shares their newspapers with the library also gets copies of the microfilm, so check out your local library or archive first.

Finally, the Project has a copy of New York's largest newspaper, an issue of The Constellation, published in NYC on the 4th of July 1859, by George Roberts. It is 51 by 35 inches and is listed in the 1991 Guinness Book of Records.