By Anne Levin
Publishing from 1882 until ceasing print issues last February, the Trenton Times was a major source of news in the capital city. Seventy-five of those years — from about 1950 until 2025 — are the focus of a photo archive that was acquired by Princeton University Library earlier this year.
Some 80,000 images are part of this massive collection, many of which have digital copies. The full haul consists of 99 boxes of photos by staff photographers, and three terabytes of data.
“One of the things that was really important to us is the fact that there is metadata, which is data about data,” said Jennifer Garcon, librarian for Modern and Contemporary Special Collections. “Scholars really need to know that kind of information.”
The acquisition came about when Princeton history professor Allison Isenberg tipped the Library off to the archive, which had been purchased by a private vendor looking for a repository capable of preserving the collection.
“Very quickly, we were interested,” said Garcon. “We started to have a conversation about whether Princeton would be the right home, as opposed to Rutgers or a historical society. But knowing how costly these materials would be to preserve in the long term, we realized that this was an opportunity for us to ensure that the photos would remain in a singular collection rather than being dispersed. We had the infrastructure to make them accessible — first in the reading room, and eventually digitally as well.”
But it took nearly a year “to navigate the logistical challenges involved in acquiring and preparing such a large and historically significant body of work,” reads a release from the Library. “As the nearly 80,000 photos still need to be processed, Library staff estimate it will be about two years before the collection is open to researchers.”
The focus of the collection is the 1960s and 70s, an often turbulent time in Trenton’s history.
“This photo collection captures the everyday life, major events, and changing communities of central New Jersey throughout the 20th century,” Garcon is quoted in the release. “Taken by Trenton Times’ staff photographers, each image includes helpful details and often connects to a published news story.”
The collection appealed to Library staff not only because they formed a rich document of local history, but also because they were well organized and well described.
“Because a lot of them were taken in tandem with stories, there was a lot of information about the photographers,” said Garcon.
Other projects of the Library’s Special Collections include the acquisition in fall of 2021 of the Romus Broadway photography collection, which documents the history of Princeton’s Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood. In conjunction with the Arts Council of Princeton, the Library launched a public exhibition of photographic collage banners drawn from the collection. Public exhibitions of the Trenton Times collection are being considered for the future.
“My hope is that folks will come to us and use the collection, and feel like it is very much a community-centered resource,” said Garcon. “As with the Romus Broadway collection, we work really diligently to make sure that though it is housed at Princeton, folks can use it for their own means. We are merely the stewards of this local history. We want it to be as broadly accessible as we can make it.”