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LSA News
No. 101, November 2009
Digital Newspaper Projects Underway At UO Knight Library
(continued)
Newspaper pages digitized as part of the NEH funding will be served from the Library of
Congress' Chronicling America site: a
free-access, national, keyword-searchable database of historic American newspaper pages
published between 1880 and 1922. Those pages — coupled with additional,
locally-funded pages — will also be made available via an Oregon Digital Newspaper
Program web site, estimated to launch in mid- to late 2010.
In announcing the federal grant to the UO and institutions in six other states on June
16, the NEH and LC officials said that the Chronicling America site, which was launched
in March of 2007, had recently posted its one millionth web page. Currently, Chronicling
America contains newspaper content from 11 states and the District of Columbia; it will
eventually contain 20 million pages of historic American newspapers from all fifty
states, published between 1836 and 1922. The site will also offer educational essays on
the history of every title represented, and provide a directory of all newspapers
published in the United States from 1690 to the present.
"The program will deliver access for people who can't get to a library to use microfilm,"
Estlund said. "The full text available with the digitized images allows for keyword
searching, which revolutionizes research of old newspapers. No longer will a researcher
need to spend hours, days or even weeks scrolling through microfilm hoping to catch what
they're looking to find."
In addition to Estlund, principles on NDNP/ODNP include Image Services Coordinator Lesli
Larson, Reformatting Specialist Linda Sato, and two full-time staff who have been hired
specifically for this project: Quality Control Specialist John Taylor and me as Project
Manager. Mary Grenci, Serials Team Leader, will lead serial title cataloging
and match
correct titles to records. A couple of students have been hired to help inspect microfilm
and aid in cataloging titles. The Document Center and Systems Department are also
integral support systems for this project. To select titles for digitization, the ODNP
team is working in consultation with an advisory board that includes historians,
librarians, curators and journalists recruited from various institutions and diverse
regions throughout Oregon.
I think we have a great team in place. We have assembled a group with diverse skills and
aptitudes, but all sharing a belief in the efficacy of resource digitization and an
abiding interest in the newspapers themselves.
The Digitization
Process The ODNP Advisory Board met in May and again in August to select an
initial list of newspaper titles to assess for digitization. Priority titles identified
at this time include the Salem Capital Journal, the Klamath Falls Evening
Herald, and various daily and weekly iterations of the Astoria Astorian.
(Note, however, that we will not make a final commitment to digitizing these particular
titles until the reels are physically inspected for both image quality and completeness
of title runs.)
We are currently in the process of reviewing and verifying each page
image on the microfilm reels in a process called "collation." Image Services will also be
taking a number of technical measurements from each reel of film. All titles will be
checked for complete serial records and accurate title changes; these titles will need an
up-to-date CONSER cataloging record before being sent to LC. All this information that
we are now gathering will eventually become part of the metadata element set that is
encoded for the newspaper pages.
To complete the digitization, Linda Sato will be
making duplicate negative reels of all selected titles. The metadata and duplicate reels
will then be sent off to a vendor outside the university. This vendor will handle film
scanning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with ALTO (Analyzed Layout and Text
Object) specification (identifying coordinates on the image), and Metadata Encoding and
Transmission Standard (METS) object creation (containing the metadata) for the project.
These digitization processes are to be outsourced because they are highly specialized,
rather time consuming, and generally require the application of proprietary software.
The vendor will ship back to UO the duplicate reel, which will eventually reside in the
archives of the Library of Congress. The digital files generated will contain TIFF,
JPEG2000, PDF, OCR text file, and METS objects with descriptive, structural, and
technical metadata. Each title selected for inclusion in NDNP will also be accompanied by
an essay detailing the history of the paper, to be posted along with the digitized pages
on the Chronicling America web site. (An example is this essay for the San
Francisco Call.)
The ODNP Quality Control Specialist will verify the data
submitted by the vendor. Completed NDNP-funded pages will be sent on to LC, as well as
being added to the local collection hosted here at the UO Libraries. Other pages will
skip LC and instead be added only to our local site. Backup copies of all data will be
stored on multiple LTO3 Tapes.
Once this process has been tested, we hope to follow
in the footsteps of Utah, Colorado, and California by facilitating newspaper digitization
for locally-funded projects. Our ultimate goal is that our local web site will steadily
grow into a "first-stop, one stop" online source for the most comprehensive archive of
digitized, freely-available, historic newspaper content related to the state of Oregon.
"Historic newspapers supply vital evidence of our history and culture, and are used
by students, scholars, historians, arts groups, businesses, urban planners, genealogists
and others," Estlund explained. "Covering early environmental preservation, industry,
agriculture, urban development, Native American issues, race relations, the establishment
of the state and more, these primary source materials provide an unparalleled window into
the life of local Oregon communities a century or more ago."
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