The Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado presents its monthly program on Sunday, March 11th from 10:00 am to Noon, at the Loup Jewish Community Center in Denver at 350 South Dahlia Street.

The program is open to all; membership is not required (though you may become a member on-site for $30/year for individuals ($40 for families). Following our regular program, members may participate in a two hour mentoring session with some of the experts from the JGSCO. If you’d like to participate in the mentoring session and are not yet a member, you may join at the program.

Our guest speaker this month will be J. Wendel Cox from the Denver Public Library.

Newspapers are inherently ephemeral. As soon as they’re printed, the news within their pages soon becomes stale, out-of-date, or yesterday’s news. And the physical object itself begins to degrade, becomes yellow and brittle, and sometimes comes to be no more than dust. Microfilm provides an excellent medium to preserve newspapers. But digitization truly opens historic newspapers for the researcher. Learn about the digitization process, the challenges it presents, and the lengths – and limits – of a brave new world of digitized historical newspapers.

J. Wendel Cox was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and received a B.A.(Honours) from the University of Winnipeg and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He taught at Arizona State University and, subsequently, at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM), with his wife, Anna Dronzek. In the fall of 2004, Wendel enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies. He completed his Master of Library & Information Science in 2005 and thereafter managed the University of Kentucky’s National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) project. In 2007, Wendel became Senior Special Collection Librarian in the Western History/Genealogy Department at the Denver Public Library.