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The Serials Librarian: From thePrinted Page to the Digital AgePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wser20

All the News That's Fit toDigitizeBrenda Bailey-Hainer a & Sarah Sutton ba Colorado State Library Association , USAb Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi , USAPublished online: 17 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Brenda Bailey-Hainer & Sarah Sutton (2007) All the News That'sFit to Digitize, The Serials Librarian: From the Printed Page to the Digital Age, 52:1-2,67-78, DOI: 10.1300/J123v52n01_07

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All the News That’s Fit to Digitize:Creating Colorado’s Historic

Newspaper Collection

Brenda Bailey-Hainer

Presenter

Sarah Sutton

Recorder

SUMMARY. In the second Vision Session of the 2006 NASIG AnnualConference, Brenda Bailey-Hainer gave a presentation on the creationand success of Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection. The presenta-tion began with the details of the project itself, including a demonstra-tion, and then continued with an account of the overwhelmingly positiveuser reaction to the project. She also described the funding model used tosupport ongoing work on the project and concluded with future plans.doi:10.1300/J123v52n01_07 [Article copies available for a fee from The HaworthDocument Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>]

KEYWORDS. Historic newspapers, digitization, Colorado HistoricalSociety, resource sharing, Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection

© 2007 by the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “All the News That’s Fit to Digitize: Creating Colorado’s HistoricNewspaper Collection.” Sutton, Sarah. Co-published simultaneously in The Serials Librarian (The HaworthInformation Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 52, No. 1/2, 2007, pp. 67-78; and: Mile-HighViews: Surveying the Serials Vista: NASIG 2006 (ed: Carol Ann Borchert, and Gary Ives) The Haworth Infor-mation Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2007, pp. 67-78. Single or multiple copies of this articleare available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00p.m. (EST). E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpress.com].

Available online at http://ser.haworthpress.comdoi:10.1300/J123v52n01_07 67

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Brenda Bailey-Hainer, Director of Networking and Resource Shar-ing Colorado State Library Association gave a presentation on Colo-rado’s Historic Newspaper Collection to a full house on Saturdaymorning, May 6 as part of the 2006 NASIG annual conference.

Bailey-Hainer is well-prepared for her work with Colorado’s His-toric Newspaper collection, having worked for nine years in academiclibraries and twelve years in library automation before taking her cur-rent position with the Colorado State Library Association in 1999.Bailey-Hainer has earned an MLS and an MN and is currently workingon a PhD in Public Affairs. She also has extensive experience managingstatewide technology projects that include collaboration between manytypes of libraries and cultural heritage institutions. She has worked onprojects such as AskColorado (http://www.askcolorado.org/), a state-wide virtual reference service and SWIFT (StateWide Interlibrary loanFast Track, the Colorado Virtual Library’s (http://www.aclin.org/) in-terlibrary loan service) as well as Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Col-lection (http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org). Bailey-Hainerreceived the Colorado Association of Libraries’ Librarian of the YearAward in 2001, was featured in Library Journal’s March 2002 specialissue on movers and shakers, and received the Colorado Association ofLibraries Outstanding Technology Project of the Year Award in 2004for her work with Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection, thesubject of this Vision Session.

The Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection project was origi-nally funded in large part by grants obtained by the CollaborativeDigitization Project in Denver, CO (http://www.cdpheritage.org/).Now that this funding has ended, the project is transitioning to a perma-nent home in the Colorado State Library (http://www.cde.state.co.us/index_library.htm) which, it was felt, is an appropriate home for a stateresource and where there is a full time staff to continue the project andsupport the project in the long term.

Bailey-Hainer began her presentation by outlining the topics she in-tended to cover. She presented the details of the project itself, the userreaction, the funding model used to support ongoing work on the pro-ject, and future plans for the collection.

PROJECT DETAILS

Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection is a single source of his-toric newspapers with statewide coverage. The goal of the project is to

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digitize newspapers from each of the sixty-four counties in the state andmake them available online, starting with the earliest published newspa-pers. Their long-term goal is to make the collection as comprehensive aspossible. The earliest published newspapers to which they have accesswere published in 1859. Based on their surveys, they believe there areabout 275 or 300 newspapers for which microfilm is available and thatwere published prior to 1923. Because of copyright concerns, the deci-sion was made to initially limit the focus of the project to digitizing ma-terials that were published before 1923 and are thus clearly in the publicdomain. However they are not opposed to doing longer runs providedthey can be sure that the copyright is cleared.

There were originally three partners on the project. The Collabora-tive Digitization Program, a nonprofit membership organization for li-braries and other cultural heritage institutions, was the lead on theLSTA and IMLS grants with which the project was begun. The othertwo project partners were the Colorado State Library and the ColoradoHistorical Society.

As of April 2006, the Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collectioncontains ninety-one newspapers published in forty-nine different citiesaround the state representing thirty-six different counties. A little over315,000 pages of newspapers have been digitized and made availablebeginning with the oldest (1859) and continuing through 1928. Many ofthe newspapers from the earlier years were short lived, having beenpublished in mining towns around the state that no longer exist. Thenewspaper that runs through 1928 was published in Swedish (becausefor a while Swedish was the state language of Colorado). They digitizedthe full run of this particular newspaper because it went out of businessin 1928 and they were certain that the copyright had cleared.

FEATURES

Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection uses Olive Softwareproducts for processing, the searching interface, and the database infra-structure. Olive’s software allows users to select newspapers from a ti-tle list or from a customized clickable map of the state which Olivecreated specifically for Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection. Thecreation of the clickable map was spurred by a need they recognizedamong users for a less cumbersome method for selecting titles from alist that was anticipated to grow to 275 titles. They found that this fea-ture also supports users who are looking for information by region.

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Once a list of regional titles is selected, the software allows the userto browse through an entire issue of the newspaper or to search throughthe text of the newspaper. This is possible because Olive had used a pro-cess called pipex, which is a sophisticated OCR process also called dis-tillation. Olive indexed the full text of the newspapers so keywordsearches on topics, names of individuals, businesses or corporations arepossible. One of the best things about the Olive software, and part of theoriginal vision for the project, is that it makes possible searches in an in-dividual newspaper or in all ninety-one newspapers.

At the same time that Olive created the clickable map for the project;they also embedded the capability of creating customized subsets ofnewspapers in which the user can then search. This ability has allowedthe staff of the Colorado State Library to create collections of featuredarticles on specific topics.

Once a search returns an individual article, that article can be viewedseparately from the page on which it appears or as it originally appearedin the paper in its historical context. This feature is especially popularwith historians. Because the digitization involves full imaging of eachnewspaper, they contain articles, advertisements, letters to the editor,and everything that appeared in the original including hand writtennotes and anything else that might have been part of the original papercopy when it was microfilmed.

DEMONSTRATION OF THE INTERFACE

Although there was no live Internet connection available for the ses-sion, Bailey-Hainer demonstrated the search interface using Power-Point slides containing screen shots. She mentioned that the first time auser accesses the site, they are asked about the speed of their Internetconnection. The system then delivers either a higher or lower resolutionversion of the site. Users are asked this only once but they must havecookies enabled in their Internet browser.

The homepage displays the clickable map. The map is divided intoregions of the state. Once the user selects a region, a list of availablenewspapers for the selected region appears. This search mechanism andresult is analogous to using the search region tab at the top of the page.The search is fairly robust; it allows combinations of keywords usingBoolean logic.

In her example, Bailey-Hainer selected the eastern plains regions.Four newspaper titles displayed. This is an example of how the creation

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of subsets reduces the problem of long lists of newspaper titles she men-tioned earlier. Within the eastern plains region, she searched for news-papers from a town called Wray and selected all four papers to besearched and a date range for her search. The results returned includethe headline for the article which contains the search term. While dis-playing the results, Bailey-Hainer reminded the audience that newspa-pers were formatted differently in the 1800s than they are today.Sometimes there is no headline at all for an article and sometimes arti-cles were strung together. This sometimes makes it hard for the soft-ware to determine where an article begins or ends. But given the layoutof historical newspapers, they felt that having results returned in thisway is still better than forcing users to hunt through an entire page orpaper for the article they seek.

Search results include the date, the newspaper title, and the city and/or county of publication, the number of pages, the page on which the ar-ticle appeared, the byline, and the section of the paper in which the arti-cle appeared. Some of the sample results did not contain data in thesefields. Bailey-Hainer explained that the Olive software was originallydesigned for modern newspaper publishers and so contains modernconventions that were not in use in the nineteenth century.

By selecting the headline from the results display the user can accessthe full text of the article which includes a pointer and highlighting thatidentifies search terms in context. She also pointed out the icon on theresults page used to select a view of the article in the context of the pageand the newspaper in which it originally appeared.

Bailey-Hainer concluded her demonstration of the search interfaceby describing some of the additional methods for searching. The browseall tab at the top of the page provides a display of the list of all ninety-one newspapers in the collection including the town and county of thepublication. The search screen allows users to narrow their search by se-lecting the year and month of publication. The results screen also in-cludes a calendar that opens up to display the dates of each edition of thenewspaper selected and in which the chosen article is highlighted.There are also fairly sophisticated tools for moving around within anewspaper issue. She noted that many of the newspapers covered notonly local items of interest but national and international news as well.The featured topics tab is hand-created by Colorado Virtual Librarystaff, allowing them to highlight and provide in-depth coverage of anew topic (often an item of Colorado history) each month.

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ACCESS

Accessibility is a continuing challenge. They continually strive to en-able users to find what they are looking for. Rather than users with spe-cific citations (their expected audience), their experience is that usersoften want to browse through a newspaper, often without even knowingits correct name. Historic newspapers tended to change names fre-quently, which makes it difficult to find a particular paper even within asingle reel of microfilm. Not only the newspapers but cities and evencounties changed names occasionally, exacerbating the problem. Thesolution is a matrix linked from the homepage, called Titles Availablein The Collection that allows the user to sort by title, city, county,language, and beginning and ending dates.

Bailey-Hainer used several examples to describe the ways differentcommunities and libraries provide access to the collection. At least onehas cataloged the collection and provides access through their OPAC.Many others provide a link from their Web sites as does the ColoradoVirtual Library, directing traffic to the collection from a link on theirhome page.

A local library, the Auraria Library, has cataloged the collection as aseries in their ILS. This allows patrons to conduct a title search on theColorado’s Historic Newspapers Collection in their OPAC. This searchreturns a list of newspaper titles that are included in the collection. Shedemonstrated this with a screenshot of the OPAC display and the resultsof selecting a title from the list. This way the patron can view a biblio-graphic record for a particular newspaper and use the link provided to ac-cess the Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection’s home page.

Another challenge they face is their desire to link the user directly tothe newspaper title they are looking for rather than to the Colorado’sHistoric Newspaper Collection’s home page. One reason they have notsucceeded in this is that, in creating the database originally, Olive ca-tered to newspaper publishers rather than librarians. Publishers havecompletely different searching needs than do libraries, librarians, andlibrary patrons.

Another example of how libraries are providing access to the collec-tion is Colorado State University Libraries who include a link on theirdatabases by subject page. The Douglas County (Public) Libraries haveincluded a link on their local and regional resources page. The ColoradoVirtual Library, a single interface providing access to library catalogsaround the state, includes a link to the site as well as a featured articlethat changes every week.

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CHALLENGES WITH ACCESS

One of the greatest challenges to access is the frequent title changesto which historic newspapers are prone (mentioned in the previous sec-tion). In order to accommodate this they added the name of the countyand/or region in parentheses to the full title. Space considerations andthe limits placed on them by the database infrastructure (which only al-lows one title per paper) require that they have only one title in each list-ing. Unfortunately, this does not allow for the inclusion of alternativetitles. Similarly, county boundaries changed over time raising the ques-tion: which county do you use, the current one or the historic one? Thenthere are the ghost towns. A number of historic Colorado towns havegone extinct, many of which published a newspaper while the town wasalive but which naturally went defunct when the town went extinct. Thechallenge this presents is how to let people know where they are whenthe towns do not exist anymore.

Optical character recognition (OCR) also presents challenges to pro-viding access to the collection. Pages containing broken type face orblurry type are difficult for the computer to interpret. Although the Ol-ive search engine does some fuzzy matching, the software guesseswhen it is not sure of a letter or a word, which is sometimes helpful andsometimes not.

Archaic or historic language is sometimes challenging to users whoare unfamiliar with it. Key word searching requires that users bear inmind the historical differences in language. For example, the databasecontains articles written about the Civil War, but the user is unlikely toretrieve the desired results by searching for African American. Insteadthey would need to search for keywords Negro or colored.

The size of the database is becoming a challenge for key wordsearches. Some common words return hundreds of results which can re-duce the overall usefulness of a search. For example, some searches arenot very useful because the search terms apply to several different enti-ties. A search for Kit Carson, which refers to a person, a town, and acounty, would return results that are too numerous to be useful.

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

Collection development was originally driven by the grants that ini-tially funded the project. Now that the grant funds have been used up,collection development is driven by practical issues. The initial conceptwas to digitize full runs of historic Colorado newspapers starting with

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the earliest available published issue. What they feared were donorswho would want to support one particular part or run of a paper (a spe-cific year or period) and wanted to avoid this since it complicates theprocess. They wanted to digitize as many newspapers as possible be-cause so many of them no longer exist. Now that grant funds are gonethey have been forced to be more particular about what they digitize.More often than not they now wait for a donor to come to them with anoffer to pay for digitization of a paper from a particular community.They have achieved the best success with newspapers from small com-munities where the papers are short and published two or three times aweek. They find it more difficult to obtain funding for digitizing dailynewspapers from larger communities because of the increased expense.

Bailey-Hainer does fund-raising by selecting communities in parts ofthe state from which they do not have any papers digitized. She is happyto demonstrate the collection for any group that shows interest. She hasalso found that they have many communities that are interested in fund-ing digitization of more recent papers if only they could clear thecopyright.

Copyright is a more complicated problem than they expected at first.For instance as they digitize from microfilm, they have learned that oc-casionally the agency that paid to microfilm the papers held copyright tothe microfilm. The Colorado Historical Society had an aggressive mi-crofilming project in the 1960s (prior to the National Newspaper Pro-ject). The Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection project leadersdecided that this would be the one place where they would try to have areally comprehensive collection. The Colorado Historical Society hasgraciously allowed the Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection pro-ject to use the negative film that The Colorado Historical Society cre-ated. But the Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection projectdiscovered that in some cases the Colorado Historical Society did notpay for the original microfilming.

A good example of this is the Greeley Tribune. Based on examiningthe positive service copies they thought that they had a full run of theGreeley Tribune. But when they obtained the master negative filmsfrom the archive and compared them to the service negatives, they no-ticed on the positives that the first four reels were missing. When theywent back to negatives, they realized that the opening frame stated thatthe filming had been done for the Greeley Public Library (and thus heldthe copyrights). But the Greeley Public Library does not exist anymore;instead it is part of a larger library district. They were lucky enough tofind someone at the library district who had replaced someone who had

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been around when the newspapers were microfilmed. It turned out thatthe film did not belong to the Greeley Public Library either but ratherbelonged to the Greeley newspaper. So they are currently negotiatingcopyright permission with the Greeley newspaper which, of course, haschanged hands several times since the film was made.

For newspapers published after 1923, additional copyright questionsarise. For example, who owns the content and who owns the newspa-per? If the paper were owned by a family there are issues of which heirowns the copyrights. They also have to take into consideration writers,cartoonists, photographers, and newswires who did not turn copyrightover to the newspaper in which their articles were published.

As a further example of the difficulties that can arise over copyrightsfor recently published materials, Bailey-Hainer described a recent work-shop that they held that included two speakers on copyright. One speakerfrom ProQuest shared a slide (which Bailey-Hainer showed to the audi-ence) that contains a dauntingly complex chart of the process thatProQuest goes through to clear copyright. The other speaker, from theGuggenheim museum, described an even more complicated process.

Processing is also complicated. Master negatives are stored in theState Archives which requires a written request be made asking thatfilm be pulled for the project’s use (for which there is a fee). The Histor-ical Society then picks up the film from the Archive and delivers it to thestate microfilm duplicating center (they keep a master negative for per-manent archival purposes). The duplicate copy is shipped to Israelwhere Olive’s headquarters are located and where the digitization takesplace. Shipping has become much more complicated since September11, 2001. In Israel, Olive scans the film in at 300 dpi, does distillation inorder to get the best possible image from each page and creates profilesfor each newspaper. Bailey-Hainer noted that if they decide to use ahigher resolution later on, the higher resolution material can be used inthe same database and will be displayed using the same interface theyare using now. The results are shipped back to Colorado on discs inXML format with copies of the .tifs instead of trying to ftp the files. Thehardest part of this process is moving the physical microfilm around; thetechnology part is much less difficult.

USER’S REACTION

The public really loves this project. During the first year of operation,and without much advertising, they had 1.3 million views of articles,

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ads, and newspaper pages. This increased in the second year and theyare already (as of May 2006) at 1.1 million views for the third year.They have about 3,500 unique visitors monthly. Bailey-Hainer de-scribes their site as a “sticky site” because users tend to stay for 25-30minutes when they come to the site.

They are also utilizing a user survey that was co-created by Utah,Virginia and Colorado through an IMLS grant, which the states ob-tained together for newspaper digitization. From the survey they havelearned that 52% of users are over sixty years of age and that another 45%are between forty and sixty years of age. From this they conclude thattheir visitors are people interested in family history, genealogists, andeducators, most of whom are from Colorado, but some are from outsidethe state.

FUNDING MODEL

The Colorado’s Historic Newspapers Collection project started witha $120,000 grant from LSTA which paid for the Olive license and aserver with one terabyte of storage. The IMLS grant for $250,000 thenpaid for the first 96,000 pages of newspapers to be digitized and somefocus groups (made up of educators, librarians, and researchers). TheCollaborative Digitization Project conducted the focus groups. As a re-sult of the focus groups and some training that the CollaborativeDigitization Project did, teachers created some K-12 lesson plans thatwere mounted on the Web site and the flyers she shared with the audi-ence. They have reached the point now where they are receiving more indonations than they had originally in grants, in fact, the project is nowdriven by contributions. In order to assist donors, they have calculatedthe cost of getting a really good image and OCR for a newspaper. Theycharge a one time $400 fee for that and $1.25 per page. There is a littlebit of overhead built into those prices to cover indirect costs like addinganother terabyte of storage.

FUTURE PLANS

They still have 2.25 million pages of papers published before 1923available to digitize. They expect to add more newspapers monthly de-pending on the availability of funds.

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Other future plans include adding more featured groups of articlesand a history or biography of each newspaper in the collection. In fact,they are working with an author who has created such biographieswhich they are planning to add to the interface. In addition to this, theywould like to create a time line of events in Colorado’s history in whicha user would see major events and be able to click on the dates they oc-curred to look at newspaper articles about it.

Another project is to look at the feasibility of adding keyword search-ing (e.g., subject headings or alternative titles) because they anticipatethat searching problems are going to multiply as the database continuesto grow. An interface exists that would allow them to accomplish thisbut it is not very time efficient.

Finally, in terms of improving interoperability, Olive is working on aversion of software that is OAI harvestable and they would like to up-grade to that version. They would also like to make it Z39.50 searchableas well, so that they can integrate it with library catalog searching.

CONCLUSION

In closing, Bailey-Hainer said that this has been one of the best pro-jects on which she has ever worked. The public began using it the mo-ment it was made available, and the state library was flooded withphone calls. They continue to receive great anecdotes from users by e-mail about how people have used the database to find information abouttheir ancestors. She really encourages other libraries to take on a similarproject if for no other reason than to improve relationships with theircommunities.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE:

There was time at the end of the presentation for questions from theaudience. The first question was regarding the fact that the NationalNewspaper Preservation Project includes historic newspapers beingfully cataloged in OCLC. The enquirer asked if the Colorado’s HistoricNewspapers Collection has found and used any of those records. Theanswer was yes, they are aware of the existence of the OCLC recordsbut they have found that the some of those records are not necessarilyaccurate so they are not always useful to the project. One frustrationthey have faced along these lines is that the Colorado Historical Society

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Archive’s typed inventory of newspapers does not match the HistoricalSociety’s hand written inventory and trying to reconcile the records wasconsidered too time consuming.

The second audience member noted that the Collection has OCRs ofthe text of the articles but not textual display of them. She wonderedwhether there were plans to add displays of the text of an article. Bailey-Hainer responded that she would write that down as a suggestion. Thenshe explained that the OCR is often less than perfect because of blurrytext. This has held them back because even though they have access tothe OCR text, they are prevented from changing it because of the waythe software maps the articles on a page. Thus they have not done it yet,but it is a really good point and they should look into it.

The final question concerned the duplicates of microfilm from whichthey do their scanning. In the questioner’s experience duplicates aresometimes not as clear as the original. She asked if they had found thatto be a problem, which they had not. Olive recommends that they usethe master negative and since they are using the master she thinks theyare getting a clear copy. Unfortunately, state policy does not allow themto ship the master archival copy to Israel for digitization. Because thiswas the case, they did not really pursue it. There is only one case whenthey digitized from the positive and that was because the negative wasno longer in existence. She thinks they are getting the best possiblequality that they can.

As the session ended, Bailey-Hainer invited participants to contacther one-on-one either there in the session venue or by e-mail with anyadditional questions they might have. Then she thanked the audiencefor attending and the session concluded.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Brenda Bailey-Hainer is Director of Networking and Resource Sharing at the Colo-rado State Library Association. Sarah Sutton is Serials/Electronic Resources Librarianat Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

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