Utah digital newspapers

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

  Perhaps I'd better post the recent press release...In searching for a word 
on this database, hit the "binoculars," and it'll help you find it on the 
page.
   "Utah Jazz"..oh, that's good.
   I can't understand what's taking so long to digitize a single newspaper in 
cities such as San Francisco, New Orleans, and St. Louis.  Why all these 
little newspapers in Ohio and Utah?
    
  
http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/03/jul/newspapers.html
    
U of U Marriott Library Offers Digitized Utah Newspapers    

July 23, 2003 -- Anyone who has spent time researching newspapers in front of 
a microfilm reader, loading reel after reel into a machine, will now be able 
to quickly and easily access digitized historic Utah newspapers through 
personal computers by entering a simple keyword into an Internet search engine. It’s 
as easy as point and click.

Researchers, historians, genealogists, as well as the general public, can now 
use the new University of Utah Marriott Library’s Utah Digital Newspapers Web 
site, which contains 20 digitized newspapers, from 13 Utah counties, printed 
between 1879 and 1956. The Utah Digital Newspapers site was created by the 
Marriott Library’s Digital Technologies Division and can be accessed at <A HREF="http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/unews/">
http://www.lib.utah.edu/digital/unews/</A> or <A HREF="http://digitalnewspapers.org/">http://digitalnewspapers.org</A> by August 1.

“You just get drawn into the content,” says John Herbert, director of the 
project. “You look for something on the Utah Digital Newspapers site; then you 
see a headline that catches your attention: “Women Who Madden Men,” for 
example, reprinted in the Wasatch Wave from The London Woman, in October 1896, and, 
because it is not politically correct today, you get drawn into it. 

The Utah Digital Newspapers project was launched in 2002 through a Library 
Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant, administered by the Utah State 
Library, which funded the development of the digitization process and the loading of 
the first 30,000 pages. Three newspapers, Wasatch Wave, Vernal Express and 
Grand Valley Times, were selected, and 10,000 pages of each were loaded onto the 
Marriott Library’s server last December.

In 2003 the project was again funded with an even larger LSTA grant awarded 
to the Utah Academic Library Consortium. The project rapidly picked up speed. “
We have dramatically expanded the scope of the program, more than tripling its 
size through August of this year. We’ve added 17 new newspaper titles along 
with 104,000 pages of content,” notes Herbert. 

The digitization process developed at the University of Utah provides high 
quality images and accurate searching at low costs, putting the U on the leading 
edge of newspaper digitization, especially at public institutions. The U’s 
process already serves as a model for other academic libraries across the 
country. Two commercial partners, iArchives, of Orem, Utah, and DiMeMa, Inc., in 
Seattle, provide processing and database services and work very closely with the 
project team on a daily basis.

This year several Utah historians recommended counties with weekly newspapers 
that should be represented. The top five were Carbon, Summit, Tooele, Juab 
and Sanpete counties. The 13 new titles included in the digitized collection are 
Eastern Utah Advocate, Carbon County News, News-Advocate, Park Record, Tooele 
County Chronicle, Eureka Reporter and Manti Messenger. Other weeklies added 
to the list were Millard County Chronicle, Emery County Progress, Green River 
Journal, Washington County News, American Eagle and Murray Eagle.

The other major additions this year were four early predecessors of the Ogden 
Standard-Examiner, the first daily newspaper in the collection. This portion 
of the project was funded by a large grant-matching gift from the Weber County 
Library. The Daily Ogden Junction is the first in the series, dating back to 
1879. 

Once decisions were made on which newspapers to include, the project team had 
to locate source materials that could be scanned—either from microfilm 
contained in the Marriott Library’s collection, one of the most extensive in the 
state, or from rare, original publications, which are hard to find and often in 
bad condition. By digging through dusty storage rooms throughout Utah, the 
project team discovered enough old newspaper collections to scan half of this year’
s volume directly from original publications. Kenning Arlitsch, Head of 
Digital Technologies at the Marriott Library and founder of the program, notes, “
Though slightly more expensive to process, original hard copies provide much 
higher image and optical character recognition (OCR) quality than microfilm. That 
means better images to view and more accurate keyword searching.” In 
addition, with the help of the Library’s Preservation Department, several older papers 
that were in bad condition were repaired and restored. Besides the Ogden 
Standard-Examiner, up to this point, only weekly newspapers have been added to the 
project, due to the higher expense of processing daily newspapers, which have 
many more pages. The project team is currently exploring ways, including 
fund-raising options, to add the early years of The Salt Lake Tribune to the 
collection. Other Utah libraries are planning to digitize other newspapers and link 
them to the Web site. 

“With this project we can open up this kind of research to a whole new 
generation of Internet-savvy users. Our eventual goal is to have a robust, statewide 
collection that will satisfy practically any newspaper researcher’s need,” 
Herbert explains.