(Jim Pickerell/Stars and Stripes)

October is American Archives Month! To celebrate, Stars and Stripes Archives and Library is sharing some “behind the scenes” images of Stripes’ operations, its staff and its archives throughout the paper’s eight decades of existence.

48th Surgical Hospital, South Korea, November 1958: Legs are strengthened by Pfc. Belte Hailu, an Ethiopian from the U.N. compound, who works out on a bicycle exerciser at the 48th Surgical Hospital.

If you look closely at this photograph, you can see the red edit marks made by the photo editor to indicate how the image should be cropped and published in the printed paper. The Pacific Stars and Stripes — which published its first issue in 1945 — lost all of its pre-1964 negatives during a move to new locations that year, so the prints of the images that were published in the paper are the only originals we have left. As part of our preservation efforts, Stars and Stripes’ archives staff has begun their digitization. All prints are scanned twice: once in full color, with the edit marks, and once in black and white, without the edit marks. 

Since 2004 the archives staff has worked to make more of our historic content available online. We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through http://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/