Partial funding for the digitization project was provided by the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. The remainder of the funding was provided by the Ithaca College Library. We are particularly appreciative of the encouragement and support of the use of cutting edge technology given by Margaret Johnson, recently retired College Librarian.

History of the Ithacan

The Ithacan is the student newspaper for Ithaca College; founded in January 1931, it has been a continuously running publication. Its back issues provide a rich historical resource for the College, for its former, current and future students and for the larger Ithaca community. A timeline of the Ithacan is provided by the Ithaca College Quarterly.

It is now available on the web, from 1931-2002, hosted by OCLC. The previous paper, titled Once-A-Week, is also available from 1926 to 1930.

The Ithacan is an award winning student newspaper. Some of its awards are detailed in the following linked pages:

Ithaca College's 'Ithacan' Named the Country's Best Weekly Student Newspaper
‘Ithacan’ Named the Best Weekly
Ithacan Students Win Awards
The Ithacan Timeline, from the Ithaca College Quarterly

Search tips

COMMON WORDS - Search operations are not performed on common words like the, a, and, an, etc.
Example: The Ithacan
Search Results: Ignores The and returns all occurrences of Ithacan

CASE-SENSITIVE - Searching is case-sensitive only when mixed cases are used. If only lower case terms are used, all occurrences of the term(s) are retrieved.
Example 1: Car
Search Results: Returns only the precise string Car, and not car.

Example 2: car
Search Results: Returns all occurrences with no regard to the relevant cases, such as both Car and car.

WORD – Performs a basic word search, selecting documents that contain one or more occurrence of the word.
Example: film
Search Results: Returns documents that include the word film. Will not match linguistic variations, such as films, filmed, and filming. Wild-card searching must be used to retrieve variations.

WILDCARD - Matches wildcard characters included in the search string.
Example: car*
Search Results: Returns documents that include words such as cars, carriage, and cartridge.
Example: car?
Search Results: Returns documents that include words such as cars and card, but not carriage and cartridge. (The question mark limits the search to the characters specified plus one more letter at the end.)

AND – Selects documents that contain all of the search words specified
Example: educational and technology
Search Results: Returns only documents that contain the words educational and technology.

OR – Selects documents that include at least one of the search elements specified.
Example: laptops or computers
Search Results: Returns documents that contain either computers or
laptops, or both computers and laptops. Note that documents containing both terms are not necessarily ranked higher on the results list.

NEAR/N - Selects documents that contain two or more words within N number of words of each other.
Example: educational <near/1> technology
Search Results: Returns documents that contain the phrases in which educational and technology are within one word of each other--educational technology or technology educational

PHRASE – Selects documents that contain the specified phrase
Enclose the phrase terms to be searched in quotation marks
Example: “Educational Technology Day”
Search Results: Returns documents that contain the phrase Educational Technology Day

Technical notes

Printing tips

There is a printing utility built into the Olive interface which works fine for most needs. If you need to print a larger article than it allows, try this method:

When viewing the page or article, select the View menu and view in PDF (this will require Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.x on your system). Use the graphics tool to select the portion you wish to print. Select print and make sure that both "shrink oversize pages to paper size" and "expand small pages to paper size" are checked (these options are in the print dialog box). Then print.

Parody or joke issues

The Ithacan and Once-A-Week have a long tradition of parody issues. These are not always on April 1; some were published as the last issue of the semester, in January or May. The last joke issue that we have identified was April Fool's Day, 1986. Some years had more than one parody issue.

Disclaimers for the digital version

It is not our intent to infringe upon any copyrights or trademarks in this historical reproduction of the Ithacan.

The current issue of The Ithacan is on the web.

Ithaca College Archives | Ithaca College Library