Among the news items in the October 24, 1935 issue of a Princeton newspaper known as the Local Express was this announcement: “Miss Jean Bunn had as her guest over last weekend Miss Mary Lou Weikert, of Englewood, New Jersey.”

In the November 2, 1876 edition of The Princetonian, predecessor of The Daily Princetonian, this item was part of the news: “The Foot Ball Twenty have chosen their suits. Black Jersey shirts, decorated with an orange P, black cheviot knee breeches, and grey stockings and hats.”

Town Topics, October 3, 1948, had this in its “Topics of the Town” column: “A friend of ours who had put away a lot of his favorite pop Saturday night told us that next day he had seen an airplane land at The Princeton Airport, shed its wings and propeller, and drive into town as an automobile. We said, ‘no, that’s what too much pop will do to you,’ but he said, kind of riled, ‘why don’t you call Bill Snow and take his word for it?’”

Such are the gems to be found in The Papers of Princeton, a digitization project currently available for viewing on the Princeton Public Library’s website. A collaboration between the library, Princeton University’s Firestone Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Town Topics, the initiative was several years in the making and includes the nearly complete collections of Town Topics, The Prince-tonian, The Princeton University Weekly Bulletin, and the weekly Local Express.

“This is a very exciting project for everyone involved,” said Erica Bess, head of Adult Services at Princeton Public Library. “We’re hoping that the entire community will make great use of this information.”

It all started a few years ago with a project by a local Eagle Scout, and the assistance of former PPL librarian Jane Brown. “This was the confluence of a couple things,” said Clifford Wulfman, the Coordinator of Digital Initiatives at Firestone Library and consultant to the University’s new Digital Humanities Center. “One thread is the digitization of Town Topics. Ira Fuchs’s son Steven did an Eagle Scout project where he managed to digitize a few years of the paper on a scanner in his basement. This created a little digital resource, which the [public] library got. That was it for a while. It wasn’t the complete run.”

Enter the Princeton Theological Seminary’s Internet Archive, one of about 30 scanners worldwide that are part of an 18-year-old non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco. The Seminary made the archive facility available for the scanning of Town Topics, underwritten in part by the University.

“They did a nice job,” said Mr. Wulfman. “And at that point, we had been working since about 2008 on a project to digitize the Daily Princetonian. We had just about finished it, and had great success outsourcing it. We had started a secondary project to do the Princeton University Weekly Bulletin and had converted the Local Express, an early Princeton paper. We thought it would be nice to put all of these together in a thematic research collection called the Papers of Princeton that could be cross-referenced.”

Donald Vorp, the director of Princeton Theological Seminary Library, said of the Town Topics segment of the project, “All of us involved were keenly aware that we were building on the vision and early work of Ira Fuchs, his son Steven, and Jane Brown of the public library. It’s been an enormous pleasure to collaborate with the University library and the public library colleagues and see the finished product.”

There were some holes in the Town Topics project due to unavailable issues or unreadable microfilm. “So we’ve started to track down missing things and come up to the current day,” Mr. Wulfman said. “Now, we get PDFs that we send out to be converted. So we’ve filled in some of the gaps, and have a few left. When all is done, we should have a fully searchable, complete Town Topics.”

The four-publication collection is geared to people searching for information about Princeton history and life in the town. “I’m excited about this not just from a scholarly perspective, but from a digital humanities perspective as well,” Mr. Wulfman said. “In addition to being able to do full text searches, this makes it possible to use these things to do deeper kinds of text analysis. We’re hoping to be able to support that kind of use as well as the local historian model.”

One aspect of the project that caught Mr. Wulfman’s interest was the history of the Dinky over time. “One can look back at this and see the multiple times it has been an issue, and where, and look at the town and gown differences,” he said. “It’s talked about in the Town Topics as well as the Daily Princetonian over the years.”

Advertisements in the papers provide a window into local life. In the September 3, 1936 Local Express, Jack Lahiere Motor Services on Spring Street urges customers to come and check out the new 1936 Plymouth. Several ads in the same issue are for businesses in Trenton, including “Pyrofax: The Complete Gas Service for Homes Beyond the Gas Mains.” A Local Express from the following year includes an ad for “Button Covering, Hemstitching, Picoting” by a Mrs. E. Perpetua of 35 and 156 Nassau Street.

“The ads are the best part,” Mr. Wulfman said. “They provide the real cultural interest, and some of the neatest things.”

That is not to diminish the actual text found in the papers, such as this one about disagreements over “class races” from the November 2, 1876 Princetonian: “However, when the day came, nearly everybody found their way down to the canal. The weather was delightful, and the canal, in the words of a N.Y. reporter, ‘like a yellow ribbon laid peacefully reposing on the bosom of the country, which was resplendent in all the glories of the Autumnal season.’”

The project was clearly a labor of love for those who contributed. “All of the issues represented a historic legacy that we’re very proud to be involved in,” said Mr. Vorp of the Town Topics segment. Mr. Wulfman summed it up: “The ability to find the stuff you want this way is just unparalleled.”