UD digitizing thousands of Delaware newspapers
Newspapers are not meant to last forever, as librarians at the University of Delaware can tell you.
They're printed on low-cost, non-archival paper, which ages quickly and crumbles. The ink fades, making it difficult to read. The paper itself yellows.
Newspapers are one the few chronicles of day-to-day history, and they are faulty, it turns out. Which is why the University of Delaware is working hard to preserve them before it is too late.
"We are part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities," said Molly Olney-Zide, project manager for the Delaware Digital Newspaper Project.
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The Delaware project began in 2015 with a mission to digitize 100,000 pages of newspaper previously only available on microfilm, Olney-Zide said. An effort launched in the 1980s preserved many of the newspapers on reels that can now be converted to digital form.
Delaware has approximately 30,000 pages available to researchers online with 70,000 more to be added by the end of 2017, Olney-Zide said. All newspapers included are in the public domain and were printed between 1690 and 1922, which means they are no longer copyrighted.
The final versions are available for free to anyone with internet access via the Chronicling American database at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
Old newspapers are used largely by historians and genealogists, Olney-Zide said. UD's Colored Conventions Project also uses old text like newspapers to uncover minutes from a series of meetings held by African-Americans in the mid- to late-19th century.
The process of digitizing the newspapers is long and tedious, even though many of them are already on microfilm.
David Cardillo, a library assistant, spends hours each day going through the microfilm and making sure the newspapers are dated correctly and have the correct issue numbers.
He prints out a spreadsheet detailing any errors and packs it into a box with the microfilm and a terabyte hard drive.
The microfilm is then shipped to India, where a company digitizes the film and converts it into searchable text. The hard drive, once returned to the university, is sent to the Library of Congress, which maintains the online database.
Cardillo said the papers are of historical interest, just because they chronicle local history. Not only that but different papers offer opposing views of political and historical events, like the Civil War, women's suffrage and more.
"It's interesting to see them side by side," Cardillo said.
The next phase of the project, for which the University recently applied for a grant, will digitize copies of the Every Evening and Evening Journal newspapers, which formed the earliest years of what is today known as The News Journal.
Those titles are expected to appear in the database by 2018. Digital copies of The News Journal from 1871 to 2017 are also available for a small fee at www.delawareonline.newspapers.com. That archive contains over 3 million digital pages or images.
Contact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or jbies@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.