The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2005, Síða 14

100
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 59 #3
paper is essential to that paper’s survival.
In many cities, there are one or two news-
papers of record, the ones that everybody
discusses. They’re the ones with the
packed letter columns, whether they’ve
hired provocative editorial columnists or
not. if nothing else, L-H can claim to be
the newspaper of record for the Icelandic
community.
It may not always have been as schol-
arly or in-depth as other publications, and
there have been many. Some, such as the
one you’re reading right now, are still with
us; others, like Leifur and the Almanak, are
long gone. But still, I often find in the back
issues of L-H a surprising article about
someone who’s making much bigger head-
lines today, such as former teacher Peter
Bjornson, now Manitoba’s Minister of
Education; or an interesting perspective on
a matter of history, such as the North
American Icelandic response to Hitler’s
pre-war interest in landing rights in
Iceland.
Sometimes, I also find out things about
my own history I never would have
known.
Two examples, concerning the same
person, have to do with my afi, Dr.
Eyolfur “Olie” Johnson, of Selkirk.
He died when I was less than a year old
and I never knew him. Most of what I
know comes from relatives’ remembrances.
A few years ago, my mother came across an
old issue of L-H from 1970 which featured
Dr. Olie on the front page. That was inter-
esting enough, but hardly a couple of
months later I saw his name in the paper’s
pages again, as part of Katrina Anderson’s
“Islensk kona” series, which was recently
published in book form. Not only was the
anecdote told therein by Asdis Anderson a
story of my afi I had never heard before, it
was also one I don’t think many others in
my family knew either.
The above story may not be something
L-H could ever compress into a sales pitch,
but it gave me a personal connection with
the paper I hadn’t had before. I suspect
that with the current efforts to digitize the
entire run of Logberg, Heimskringla and
L-H, many more will have similar experi-
ences. Currently there are only two and a
half years’ worth of back issues available
online. This was begun in 2003, and over
the last year, I have begun sorting through
our digital archives to produce online
copies for our website - as I write this, I’m
still partway through 2002, and I hope to
do the same for every issue going back to
the time I started in 1998. (If there are dig-
ital backups from before then, I haven’t
been able to unearth them.) However, this
year’s announcement by the Government
of Iceland, that it will sponsor the digitiza-
tion of all the back issues, means that oth-
ers will soon be able to tap into this
resource more easily.
And that, whatever happens to the
Icelandic presence in North America or the
newspaper itself, will remain for future
generations. Logberg-Heimskringla has
been a chameleon on the surface of
Icelandic communities in Canada and the
United States, showing through its pages
the colour of debate and communication.
Each of those colours is preserved for
future generations.
Of course, I can’t go to work every
morning with the weight of generations on
my shoulders. The board and staff have to
constantly think of the paper as something
new, something we must improve on with
every issue. Sometimes we succeed; some-
times we don’t. But though the back issues
may accumulate, you’re only as good as
your next edition. And there’s always a
deadline.