Improving access to archives

Looking for your great- grandfather's obituary, or an article about your family's business or farm in Foster County in the early 1900s? There's a new way to read local newspapers from the past as close as your computer screen.

Michele Seil, director of the Carrington City Library, presented its new digital archive of area newspapers in front of the Carrington Kiwanis Club on April 6. The archive is available online at https://carringtonlibrary.advantage-preservation.com/

The Foster County site includes 14 newspapers that operated in the area throughout history. Issues of the Foster County Independent from 1901 to 1953 are archived, a total of more than 23,000 newspaper pages. The sidebar contains the names of all the newspapers in the Carrington City Library's digital archive, along with the years of each available to view.

The funds to complete the project came from a Local History Grant through the North Dakota State Library and North Dakota Coordinating Council. The program supports the efforts of libraries across the state that are interested in telling the stories of their communities, preserving materials and memories, and increasing opportunities for the public to connect with the past.

The local library was awarded one of these grants to digitally archive Foster County newspapers and make them searchable. The library received $9,999, which they used to contract with Advantage Archives, a company that digitizes newspapers. The project took just a few months to complete, as the funds were approved on November 15, and the archive site was live at the end of March.

The focus is on access to the content, according to Advantage Archives.

After they digitize the microfilm, they use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to create a searchable database, create an index and host the images on a portal that patrons can browse, search, view, clip, and share articles and pages from the community's history.

It's not perfect, Seil acknowledges, as the software can't "read" all the decorative fonts found in 1900s newspapers. Therefore, some of the text in the search database might be garbled or misspelled. However, if you click on an individual entry, the actual newspaper page will open, where you can read the full story, clip it and share.

Another thing you might notice are flaws in the pages. The microfilm archival process preserves the page in the condition in which it was received at the State Historical Society. Therefore, sometimes the pages have small holes, tears or other flaws. That's all a part of history.

Readers looking for a newspaper clipping from a different county or area of the state should check out the North Dakota archive, Papers from the Past, http://ndarchives.advantage-preservation.com/

More than 150 newspapers in North Dakota are available to view on that site.

As part of this effort to make history more accessible, the Foster County Historical Society is also sorting through documents and photos in its archives to preserve digitally. Seil said that pictures of Main Street, businesses on Main Street, the courthouse and other historical buildings will be included in the online archive, as well as pictures of people who were key to building the Carrington community.

". . . We are in the early stages of doing this," Seil noted. "In addition to the historical society, we are working with Corean Swart, Foster County Veterans Services officer. She will provide us with a few documents that honor and recognize the veterans from the Carrington Area who served." Among them will be pictures from WWII, N.D. National Guard, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Vietnam War. Seil anticipates that these items will be available on the website by early summer.

In the near future, residents will have the opportunity to incorporate their family or community history into the archive. Seil said the library plans to host a "Scan Day" event this fall, where residents can bring their photos and documents to be digitized by expert archivists. They then receive digital replicas of their items, which are also added to the local archive for viewing by others.