Digital Collections

Rocky Mountain News Photograph Collection

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SummaryThe Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that was a Denver institution for just short of 150 years, was Colorado's oldest newspaper and possibly the longest-running business in the state. Born during the 1859 Colorado Gold Rush, the paper went through many ups and downs, until it finally closed its doors in 2009, just two months shy of its 150th anniversary. For that century and a half, the Rocky Mountain News was to many Coloradans, the "standard," indispensable at breakfast, in the boardroom or at the races, and the news source for generations.

Over the decades, the Denver Public Library has acquired materials from the Rocky, and in 2014 received the paper's entire corpus of digital images to add to our collection. The digital images join our thousands of back issues of actual newspapers bound in volumes, photographic negatives, and comprehensive microfilm of the paper's entire run. On June 8, 2009, Scripps-Howard announced that the Denver Public Library "would assume ownership of the Rocky's voluminous archives, including all digital and paper newspaper clipping files."

In addition to the almost 300,000 digital images acquired by the Library, there are also some 2,500 archival containers, about 500 of them of photographs, organized by biography and subject, and which are being processed by volunteers. Western History and Genealogy Librarians are already locating items for researchers from these collections, even as our processing continues.

This collection represents the born-digital files as well as digitized photographs from the physical collection.Search

Denver Newspaper Agency employees Geoffrey Green, left, and Bert Myers, look out over Colfax Ave. from the 10th floor patio on the 10th floor of the new building that will house for the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post and the Denver News

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