For many Cavalier Daily alumni, a glance through the paper’s bound volumes evokes more vivid college memories than any yearbook: You see a story you wrote, an ad you booked, or a photo you shot, waxed or pasted.

Now as the newspaper prepares to move into its 110th year and into a new millennium with the rest of the world, efforts are underway to electronically preserve the paper’s fragile 19th- and 20th-century copies.

And with the ability of University graduates to turn anything into a giant cocktail party, there’s some of that on the way, too, as the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association plans a Year 2000 celebration.

The highlight of the proposed weekend is a Rotunda dinner scheduled for May 6 next year, which CDAA Events Coordinator Diane DeBerry said she hopes will echo the spontaneity of the paper’s 100th anniversary celebration in 1990.

"People got up and started reminiscing about the paper after the dinner," said DeBerry, ’90-’91 editor-in-chief. "It was a very sentimental series of moments about what the CD meant to them or how it affected them in their career choices."

USA Today columnist Taylor Buckley, who once wrote CD movie reviews, already has agreed to speak at the upcoming event. Other possible weekend activities include golf at Birdwood on Saturday, an alumni vs. staff softball game and a Corner bar night Friday, DeBerry said.

"The consensus among alumni is that a reunion of this sort is long overdue," said Scott Ramsey, ’90-’91 operations manager and ’91-’92 business manager.

"It will be a chance for CD alumni to reunite with their graduating class, but also with the people they worked with day in and day out," he said.

At the Rotunda dinner, pieces of CD memorabilia will be on display, including bound volumes and enlarged copies of stories about effects of World War II, coeducation and other major issues on the University, Ramsey said. Even the faceplate of "Maggie," the several-hundred-pound typesetter, may be on display.

Concurrent with reunion planning, Ramsey and other volunteers are working on a project to research the history of the University as told through the pages of The Cavalier Daily and by its alumni. To kick-start that effort, the CDAA is soliciting responses to the survey in this issue. The type and volume of response to the survey will determine much about how the history project, and the reunion in general, proceeds.

A key part of organizing the reunion, Ramsey said, will be finding class sponsors to volunteer to contact CD staffers they worked with to help spread word of the millennium festivities. "We want to make sure that several eras are represented, rather than it being just a bunch of people I know or who you know," Ramsey said.

But before the party starts, the CDAA is preparing for digitizing the bound volumes. CD alumnus Robert Cullen (’70) has researched the cost of digitizing the paper, which involves paying to retype every page at $1 per 1,000 characters. (The first 16 words of this paragraph constitute 100 characters, for example.)

A student hired to survey the bound volumes estimated they contained 784 million characters of text, putting the cost of retyping everything from 1890 to the present at approximately $784,000. "Obviously, this is not something that can be done all at once," DeBerry said.

When the paper debuted in 1890 as College Topics, four pages were published weekly. The first decade contains approximately 25 million characters, which would cost a much more manageable $25,000 to retype, Ramsey said. "This decade of bound volumes is in the worst shape and in the most need of preservation."

An option that may become more cost-effective in the future is using digital scanners and optical character recognition technology. But today’s OCR software has problems reading even brand-new newsprint, much less yellowed copies with century-old fonts, Ramsey said. Extensive manual effort is still required to proof OCR mistakes.

David Hallock, editor-in-chief ’91-’92, was startled by the poor quality of the bound volumes when he reviewed them with Bob Musselman, College Topics editor-in-chief in the early 1930s.

Some Depression era pages are starting to tear and disintegrate, while 19th-century editions are even more at risk, Hallock said. "They’re in even worse shape, and they’re getting worse every day."

The CDAA has considered the digital archive effort since before 1995, when the paper started publishing on the World Wide Web and first offered a searchable database of back copies, Ramsey said. About three-quarters of the papers from 1991 to 1995 are backed up on floppy disks in a different format. A shorter-term and less expensive project can be undertaken to convert these digital archives to a Web-ready format.

Preserving the bound volumes will preserve the newspaper’s vast history so it is available for future generations of alumni, students and the general public, Ramsey said. The papers would be easily available for historical research or for an alumnus who wants a stroll down memory lane, he said.

"I’ve always found looking at the bound volumes to be a lot of fun," he said, adding that anyone who looks back gets an idea of what the newspaper and the University were like.

A recent push to boost the CDAA’s scholarship endowment brought in $14,000, and efforts will now shift towards preservation and digitization of the bound volumes, Ramsey said. Direct solicitation of CD alumni will not begin until a formal proposal comes together, he said. Then armed with that support, the CDAA will look for matching grants from other sources.