Talon Marks' entire archive now available online

Talon Marks staff work on a newspaper edition. Courtesy photo

NORWALK – The Talon Marks’s entire catalog of newspapers — 62 years’ worth of stories chronicling life on the Cerritos College campus – is now online and available to the public.

Each print edition, from the very first publication in 1957 to the most recent issue, was scanned and made into a searchable PDF using OCR technology, school officials said.

The archives are available online at talonmarks.com/archives, where the editions are categorized by academic year.

The project was a collaborative effort between the college’s Mass Communications Department and the Cerritos College Library after they both recognized a need to digitally archive the newspapers as historical documents.

The entire process took eight years to complete. Each newspaper had to be prepared for scanning and then digitally processed for public use.

A Talon Marks newspaper from 1989. The newspaper’s entire archive is now available online. Courtesy photo

Alicia Edquist, instructional lab technician I for the department, headed the project, with assistance from former Talon Marks adviser Rich Cameron and former adult hourly Rosaura Montes.

“The Talon Marks Digital Newspaper Project is vital in preserving the history of our college,” said Fine Arts and Communications Dean Gary Pritchard. “I am proud of Alicia Edquist and the tremendous effort that went into digitizing 62 years of Talon Marks. I hope everyone is as excited as I am to search the archives.”

The idea for a digital archive came about in 2010, when the newspaper archives in the library were damaged by a leaky roof.

“Being able to preserve our campus history was a priority for us when we began this project,” said Edquist. “Some of the print editions of Talon Marks had been damaged and we knew it was time to make sure our newspaper’s legacy was preserved. It was vital to preserve the journalism and history of the ever-changing campus community.”

According to Edquist, the student newspaper receives multiple requests for archives each year.

The Mass Communications Department is part of the Fine Arts and Communications Division at Cerritos College. The department houses the journalism and radio/TV courses for the campus.