The 99th Air Base Wing History Office launched a collaboration with UNLV to digitize its collection of more than 50,000 newspaper pages, with some articles dating back to the base's earliest days in World War II.
The digitization project addresses the need to save a fragile and irreplaceable archive of newspapers, some showing decades of wear including hole punches, frayed edges, and the natural decay of old newsprint. The process will preserve the base's rich history and make it accessible to the public and future generations of Airmen.
"Paper is not a forever product," said Jim Flook, 99th Air Base Wing historian. "Newspapers were designed to be economical, not to last in perpetuity."
The project’s initial phase, funded by the UNLV Library Advisory Board, covers equipment and student labor needed to begin processing the archives. The partnership will ensure that the Air Force has a modern, searchable digital archive for researchers and generations of future Airmen while giving UNLV students hands-on experience in digital preservation.
"It’s a really good experience because you do everything from a bit of metadata, a bit of project management, some photo editing, film editing,” said Malik Ahmad, a digital collections student assistant with UNLV. “It creates an informative experience for me.”
Digitizing historical archives enables the U.S. Air Force to modernize its institutional memory. By transforming the newspapers into searchable digital data sets, the office is building the foundational infrastructure required for advanced technologies, like generative artificial intelligence, to operate effectively. Digitization allows AI to rapidly comb through decades of base history as data, enabling leaders to identify historical patterns, analyze past operational options, and extract crucial insights to strengthen and inform modern decision-making.
“We're not just digitizing so people can look at it,” said Cory Lampert, head of digital collections at UNLV. “We're also digitizing so that collections can become data.”
The digital archive captures a rare look at the social fabric of the installation, including local theater performances, bowling leagues, and community events that do not often make it into official military records. This human-centric approach ensures the legacy of the Nellis community remains as visible as its military achievements. For Ahmad, these accounts are the heart of the collection.
“There's a beauty in reading these newspapers,” Ahmad said. “It humanizes the people behind the uniform.”
While the 99th ABW History Office holds a nearly complete run of base newspapers from 1995 until their final publication in 2017, the collection spanning the 1980s and early 1990s is more sporadic. To fill gaps in the historical record, Flook is leaning on the Las Vegas community and military retirees to crowdsource missing issues from private collections.
“We don’t have a perfect record of every issue,” Flook said. “Past generations of Airmen did not always keep and preserve the newspaper. Crowdsourcing these missing pages from the local community will be an invaluable resource in archiving the installation's complete newspaper.”
The project aims to tell a more complete story of Nellis Air Force Base, one that highlights the families and individual Airmen who have called the base home over the last 80 years. Ultimately, the digitalization initiative is more than just preserving old papers. It’s about connecting current Airmen to their heritage and using the past to inform the future.
