Scope
CamdenBase includes citations to articles, books, book chapters, government documents, and other published materials covering the political, social, and economic history of the city of Camden, New Jersey. General interest items, such as birth announcements, obituaries, marriage announcements, etc. are normally not included in the database unless the item had some kind of special regional significance. Coverage runs from 1945 to June 2003. The database largely includes citations from articles about Camden published in the Courier-Post from mid-1999 to mid-2003. Abstracts for these citations are the lead paragraph for the article and are used with permission from the Courier-Post.
Today's issue, and selected South Jersey stories from the last fourteen days of the Courier-Post are available online for browsing. All researchers have access to the Courier-Post on microfilm in the Paul Robeson Library. Rutgers Faculty, students and staff can remotely access the digital microfilm of the Courier-Post from 2010 to present using their Rutgers NetID.
Please see or call a reference librarian for assistance.
The Camden County Library has full text access to the Courier Post from 1999 to present. Researchers must have a Camden County Library barcode in order to access remotely. Any researchers may access on site.
The Camden County Historical Society may also provide research assistance on the Courier-Post.
CamdenBase provides bibliographic access to over 6,000 articles.
History
The Paul Robeson Library, which opened its doors in 1969, serves as general campus library for the Rutgers Camden campus. In addition to the over 5,000 Rutgers Camden students, faculty and staff that use the library, the Paul Robeson Library serves as a resource for a diverse local community. The CamdenBase project began as a newspaper clippings file of local interest stories in the early 1970s produced by Business Librarian, Tim Schiller. The clippings were kept in scrapbooks loosely organized by subject and date.
As the database file grew over the years, and as individual records became more cumbersome to access, Tim began an indexing system to make the retrieval easier. By the early 1980s, he began periodically producing a computer printout of the file, which included the indexing terms and a list of citations. Around this time, maintenance of the file became the responsibility of the Humanities Librarian, Jean Crescenzi, who created a database for this file in order to facilitate searching.
In 1999, Paul Robeson Electronic Access Librarian, Ann Scholz-Crane and student computer technician, John Gibson along with Ron Jantz of the Rutgers University Libraries' Scholarly Communication Center converted the existing database into a format that could be accessed and searched via the World Wide Web.