Go behind the scenes of The Star’s photography archive at free KC Library event
For more than 145 years, The Star has created the first draft of Kansas City history, from the development of the park system to the upcoming World Cup.
As the city’s paper of record, The Star has decades of archives that tell the stories of Kansas City’s triumphs, tragedies and tensions. While our archives of pages and stories have been accessible to the public through Newspapers.com and the Kansas City Public Library, it’s only been recently that our award-winning photography has been published online.
After The Star donated a copy of our digital image archive to the Kansas City Public Library in 2022, the entire collection — encompassing images that appeared in the 1920s all the way through the late 1990s — was published online last month. It’s open to all at kcstarphotos.org.
Now the library and Star journalists will come together for an event to discuss the importance of local history, The Star’s role in capturing and recording it, and the gems that can be found in the new digital archive.
The event, All History is Local, will feature Star photojournalist Tammy Ljungblad, Star editor and former research director Derek Donovan, and KC Library special collections manager Jeremy Drouin.
Moderated by Star Opinion Editor Yvette Walker, the event will feature Ljungblad’s recollections of photographing some of the metro’s biggest events, Donovan’s stories about preserving and cataloguing The Star’s huge archive, and Drouin’s recounting of how the massive digital archive project came together.
The event is at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 12, at the Plaza Branch of the library, 4801 Main St. If you’re interested in attending, you can RSVP through the library’s website.
The Star will have prints of select photos available for sale to take a piece of our archive home for yourself, and will have several staff members on site to meet with subscribers and other fans of The Star.
You can also watch the event live from home via the library’s livestream.
You can see a few photos below that are part of the archive and represent some of the remarkable history showcased on the new website and at Thursday’s event.
This story was originally published February 9, 2026 at 3:42 PM.
