Campaign Similar to Others Nationwide

By Kim Ramsey
College Topics Staff Writer

As one may guess, the question of preserving fragile print issues of newspapers is not an issue unique to The Cavalier Daily and its alumni. Newspapers across the country are struggling to find the best methods to protect and preserve their archives.

Contacts made through a loose affiliation of other college newspaper alumni associations have shown that preservation and digitization campaigns, like the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association’s, are at the forefront of issues other organizations are facing at the turn of the millennium.

"We realized that we have 100 years of bound volumes basically rotting away in the Daily Cal’s internal archives, and it was time to do something to preserve our archives for future use," said Mike Coleman, co-coordinator at The Daily Californian Alumni Association of the University of California at Berkeley.

"We also figured all along that archive preservation would have a certain romanticism that our alumni would be interested in," he added. "I mean, if you worked on the paper in the late ’40s, for example, you’d hate to think that the last records of what you poured your blood, sweat and tears into would disappear forever."

Like the CDAA, the DCAA has recently launched a fund-raising campaign to finance archive preservation. Initial alumni response has been very encouraging, said Coleman.

The DCAA’s preservation project will proceed in several steps. First priority, Coleman said, is to repair some of the paper’s bound volumes that are in the poorest condition. Second, the DCAA intends to fund the creation of a full set of microfiche copies of the archives to be kept in the Daily Cal’s offices. The third and final step is digitization, which Coleman refers to as "by far the grandest part of the plan, and the most important for the long term."

While undertaking steps one and two, the DCAA is researching the most effective and cost-efficient method of digitization. "At this point, we’re excited by the prospect of digitizing the archives off of microfiche, instead of off of the actual printed newsprint," Coleman said. "Our preliminary research shows that this is by far the easiest and most cost-efficient way of doing it. But there are issues of quality, of course, since microfiche copies are not always of the best quality.

"The underlying theme of our archive preservation project is that it’s a work in progress, and we’re eager to see how other college dailies of our size/age— like the CD—handle theirs," he added.

The Daily Collegian at Pennsylvania State University is also tackling the issue.

According to Gerry Hamilton, general manager and adviser to the Daily Collegian, "We began storing digital versions in 1979 on eight-inch floppy disks, which were common at the time. I wanted to start preserving data for the digital library I knew was coming in the future."

Due to a change in equipment, the first four years of data were unretrievable. However, the paper "is now in the process of converting that data for our online archives. One of our systems supervisors is working on a Visual Basic application to speed the process."

The paper has plans to manually rekey its first issue and some "milestone issues" to make sure they are preserved and, before retiring their production camera, they intend to capture on film newsworthy or memorable front pages, or perhaps entire issues, to add to the online archive.

"As for the rest, we are thinking in terms of scanning, which would be done by our employees mainly during semester breaks," Hamilton said. "This is last on our list, because we’re hoping the job will become easier as technology advances."

The Daily Cardinal Alumni Association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also has preservation goals on its agenda.

"The Daily Cardinal two years ago established its Archive Project in part to get caught up on our binding and microfilming," said Allison Sansone, chair of historical preservation for the DCAA. "We had an 11-year backlog of papers that had never been filmed and three years of papers to be bound."

According to Sansone, the DCAA has considered digitization as well but at this time rejected it as "too costly and also too unreliable.

"We’re unable to predict hardware and software changes that may make it necessary to redo the process every few years just to keep up with technology," she said.

The Red & Black of the University of Georgia, however, is in fully into digitization, thanks in large part to the efforts of the University of Georgia Library system.

"The UGA library has an extensive project of archiving all of the state of Georgia’s newspapers," said Mary Straub, office manager for the Red & Black Publishing Co. "They received special grant money to get it going and the project has continued to be funded."