Unearth Cincinnati's archived past, thanks to historic Enquirer-library partnership

Do you have an old Enquirer photo you’re looking for? Maybe a family member was featured on the front page, or in the crowd at a Reds game, but you don’t know the date.

Soon you’ll be able to search for the photos yourself.

The Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library is giving the public access to the Enquirer photo collection as part of its online Digital Library.

The Cincinnati Enquirer Photo Archive page on the library website (chpl.org/exhibits/cincinnati-enquirer-photo-archive) goes live Monday, Feb. 19, with the first 2,000 images from the collection.

There are many more to come. Something like over 1 million more.

Enquirer photos were donated so they could be preserved and accessible

In late 2022, as The Enquirer prepared to move to new offices, the newspaper donated its entire hard-copy photo collection to the public library. The purpose was two-fold: that this important collection of our history be permanently preserved, and that the photos be available for the public to see.

“Our goal is to preserve these photos for posterity. The best way we can do that is through digitization,” said Larry Richmond, manager of the library’s Genealogy and Local History Department.

The library already had a digitization team in place, since it is actively digitizing its own collection.

Digitization includes the all-important metadata that Google loves so much. Each photo will include the original photo caption, the date and the photographer. All that searchable information will make the photos easier to find through Google. Much, much easier than sifting through endless folders.

The Enquirer photos mostly cover the years from 1945 to 1995. Not every photo will be digitized due to copyright restrictions. So, no Associated Press photos or press releases.

But the images created by Enquirer photographers are ample, covering Cincinnati’s day-to-day history, from mayors to Boy Scouts, Music Hall to winter snow, Harvest Home Fair to high school football.

“The Cincinnati Enquirer archive is a treasure trove of local history and full of famous Cincinnati events, historical buildings, genealogical information and so much more,” Clarity Amrein, the library’s community content coordinator, said in the introductory video on the site.

You can help determine which photos are digitized next

Over the past year, the library staff has taken inventory of the more than 36,000 folders in the collection. Each folder is listed in the inventory database accessible on the website. They kept The Enquirer’s categories: Cincinnati, People, Things and Ohio.

Scanning the photos is relatively quick. They can scan 300 a day, Richmond said. But adding the metadata takes time.

Digitizing the whole collection will take years. But you have to start somewhere, and they gave special attention to the Cincinnati section because they figure that’s where most of the interest lies.

What’s next is for you to decide.

“We’re going to let the public determine our digitization priority,” Richmond said.

They are now taking photo requests from the public for images in the collection that haven’t been scanned yet. There’s a form on the site you can fill out to request 20 images at a time. The staff will then take that opportunity to scan all the photos in the requested folder. That way, the images that attract the most interest will be digitized first.

The Enquirer still holds the copyright on the material, though. Anyone wanting to publish these images will need to contact The Enquirer, rather than the library, at lgillespie@enquirer.com.

Not every photo that appeared in The Enquirer will be in the collection. Some photos have disappeared or were misplaced over the years. On the other hand, some photos in there may not have been published before. They may have been additional images from a photo shoot.

Certainly, the vast majority of these photos have not been seen since they were first filed away.

Review from a newspaper librarian

I have spent nearly 25 years working with the Enquirer photo files. I was in charge of the collection from 2009 until we handed them over. Although we were always willing to share with researchers, historians and Enquirer readers, we were hampered by having just one librarian. That is what has changed. The time and resources are now available to properly archive the archive.

For me, one great advantage of the collection in the Digital Library is the searchability.

It wasn’t always easy to find photos. We had to deduce how previous librarians would have filed things.

Photos of Kings Island, for instance, were not filed under “K” in the Cincinnati section. Try “W” in Things, for Warren County. NASA and the moon landing? They were under “Earth satellites.” (Because they orbited the Earth.)

Now, you can do a word search of the inventory database and instantly identify the correct box and folder.

You may notice some photos have marks on them. Most of those are crop marks drawn by editors in white paint or red grease pencil to show where the photo should be cropped for print. Sometimes the rejected areas were X’d out.

In the 1940s and ’50s, photos were often touched up by artists for reproduction in the newspaper. Detail was often lost in print, so defining lines were added so that dark objects, such as the contours of someone’s hair, could be discerned against a dark background.

Another benefit of viewing scans of the actual photos is the greater detail that's visible.

One photograph the library pulled out as a highlight of the collection shows two Cincinnati police officers in Over-the-Rhine. The caption tells us the photo appeared in print on Dec. 20, 1983.

Going to the microfilm, we find that very photo on the front page for that date. But how it appeared in print compared to the original photo is night and day.

In print, it’s high-contrast, muddy black and white. In the scan of the photo, there is more nuance, more grays. You can see the buildings down the street, the trash and boxes on the curb, the wrinkles in the police uniforms and the subtlety of the expressions on their faces.

There is so much more to be found in The Enquirer photo archives.

Now that these photos will no longer be hidden away in a folder, they will be out there for all to see.

Take this quiz to test your knowledge of Cincinnati history

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati Library unearths city's history with old photos now online