Washington Music Industry History Preserved Through State Library Digitization Project

OLYMPIA — The Washington State Library has preserved more than 20 years of music industry history through digitizing The Rocket magazine, a popular Seattle publication that covered music venues and bands.

Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, recently digitized over 16,000 pages of historic newspapers for the Washington Digital Newspapers website, including 333 issues of The Rocket.

The Rocket ran from 1979 to 2000, prior to the popular use of the internet, covering music venues and regional bands from Seattle to Portland, including Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Dandy Warhols and Soundgarden. The Los Angeles Reader called it “the best regional music magazine in America.” The Sub Pop record label also found its origins in the office of The Rocket. 

The now digitized paper contains 16,568 pages of keyword searchable historic music industry news – all of which are accessible to the public at no charge, thanks to funding by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Washington Digital Newspapers program.

“Historians, educators, students, and anyone who wants to learn more about the events that shaped music culture in our state now have greater access to this unique history,” Washington Digital Newspapers Coordinator Shawn Schollmeyer said. “We are grateful for this collaboration with Newspapers.com, University of Washington Libraries and long-time editor Charles Cross, who all share our commitment to preserving our state’s cultural heritage.”

With help from students and staff at the University of Washington Suzzallo and Allen Libraries, the original print pages were scanned to create preservation microfilm copies for scanning to a high-quality file format. Washington State Library then coordinated the metadata processing and Optical Character Recognition scanning with Newspapers.com to make the pages searchable. Crowd-text correction features on the library website help improve the search on pages where the images may be too dark or damaged before the filming and scanning process.

The Washington State Library in Olympia maintains a physical newspaper collection with over 6,500 newspaper titles and more than 52,000 reels of microfilm. For more information about Washington Digital Newspapers and Washington State Library, visit washingtondigitalnewspapers.org and sos.wa.gov/library, or Ask A Librarian about interlibrary loans or visitation appointments.