North Peace Historical Society has a 77-year backlog of hard documents to digitize. The Alaska Highway News began in 1944 as a weekly newspaper. It became a daily in the 1980s; in 2016, it shifted back to a weekly publication. All told, its volumes total more than a quarter-million pages.
Searching for information is incredibly time consuming. North Peace Historical Society is a one-staff museum with volunteers. Sjoblom also has a core team of long-time residents she calls on to help narrow down search windows. Then they comb through microfilm of the newspaper. “People don’t realize it’s not an easy search,” says Sjoblom. “You can’t just type it in and have everything pop up. You have to skim through the microfilm, and you’re afraid you might miss something that way.”
They have hard copies of every paper up to 1975. However, they prefer checking microfilm first to help preserve the newspapers. These older documents are extremely fragile; age has also distorted the copy. Reopening the documents degrades text and images even more.
Digitizing will help organize their archives. Right now, their information is everywhere: on USB keys, in emails, in file folders, hard copy indexes, etc. They’re also dealing with odd paper sizes – everything from five-inch square to 25-inch square. And their collections include thicker paintings and pictures that can’t be scanned properly. Instead, the only option was to stand above the document and “scan” it with a camera.
Lastly, the nonprofit has a limited budget to work with it. Luckily, in 2020, they received a grant through their regional district.
North Peace Historical Society is relying on volunteers to do all the digitizing. Documents are brought into the system electronically (email or files) or through the scanning system. They can then be classified, indexed or archived using the Therefore™ Capture Client.
“The indexing part is what we really like because it’s very straightforward to volunteers,” says Sjoblom. “It’s not time consuming. In some ways, it’s simpler than our [photo] database since there’s only four fields of information. That means everything is indexed [the same way]. It’s also easy to move things around. If papers get scanned with pages out of order, it’s simple to change that or add a page that got missed.”
Therefore™ features optical character recognition (OCR) technology. The software makes documents searchable – even originals with age-distorted text – which speeds up the group’s ability to respond to inquiries and to research exhibits and other items in their collections. Thanks to Sub Second Retrieval and database OCR Searching, Sjoblom only needs to type in a name to find every time that person comes up in any document. “We know without having to go through a whole year of the newspaper if someone’s name didn’t appear, and we can check that off our list instead of going through months of microfilm and thinking we missed a name,” she says.
The software also helps preserve the original records. In the past, finding information was just half the struggle. Every time someone touched a 40- or 50-year old newspaper, they risked compromising its condition.
“They wanted to extend the life [of the artifacts],” says Thomas Whitton, Account Manager – Software Solutions, Ideal OS. “We’re able to do that – get it scanned safely, and then they can go into archival and they never have to touch it unless they absolutely need to.”
There are decades of newspapers where there’s only one copy in existence. “[Archiving] safeguards these copies, so there’s a whole other means should the museum or the newspaper office suffer a fire,” she says. “We don’t want decades of history wiped out. This is yet another means to preserve that.”
Therefore™ also provides them one central storage area, and everything is regularly backed up.
After Ideal OS installed the software, scanner and PC workstation, they trained staff and volunteers. North Peace Historical Society has a dozen community volunteers committed to the project. Whitton spent multiple days on training – meeting with volunteers in smaller groups that fit their schedules – and showing them tips and tricks. They customized the software for their client. “We built a strong index data for them, index data that would be most appropriate for their goals,” says Stowe.
Once the group started archiving in earnest, three volunteers finished three years of the newspaper in two weeks. If they continue at their current pace, Sjoblom anticipates up to 20 years of the newspaper scanned and indexed by the end of the summer. “We get the bulk of our inquiries from the first 20 or 30 years of our paper, and that forces us to go back into the newspaper,” she says. “[Having it digitized] is going to make it a real life-changer.”
Ideal OS also helped them scan some of their pioneer history books. Having this information at the press of a button will make a big difference when Sjoblom creates exhibits.
Ideal OS had three targets to meet with their solution for this project: it needed to be simple and budget friendly, and it needed to meet the client’s technical requirements (storing and archiving over 50,000 pages and making them available for searching any word in an instant). “It was hard to do,” says Whitton, “but with the solution we came up with, we ticked off every single one of those boxes.”