Philadelphia—Want to add a set of unique materials to your campus library’s digital collection? Scan the archives of the student newspaper. That’s what Bart Schmidt, a digital-projects librarian at Drake University, decided to do last year with The Times-Delphic.
Most student-newspaper archives “are unindexed and totally underused,” Mr. Schmidt told people who stopped by his poster presentation this afternoon here at the Association of College and Research Libraries conference. But they represent a unique resource, he said. And “nobody else is digitizing your student newspaper.”
It doesn’t take a lot of resources, he said. At Drake, they use a Microtech Scanpro microfilm scanner, Adobe Photoshop, CONTENTdm digital collection-management software, and student labor. Mr. Schmidt does some minimal quality control on the scans.
“If it’s legible, it’s good enough,” he said. “The most important thing is to get them up and make them searchable.” The library adds basic information to make the issues findable by researchers: date, volume, issue number, pages numbers.
The project began about a year ago, inspired in part by a professor who wanted to work the material into a class, and in part by Mr. Schmidt’s own “Why not?” feeling. “Drake is known for its journalism school,” he said, and The Times-Delphic dates back 126 years, so it represents a significant record of how student journalists have learned their trade over the decades.
The library holds most of the printed copies that exist; a year’s run from the 1920s is missing, according to Mr. Schmidt, who mentioned a rumor that it had been stolen because it contained references to alcohol during Prohibition.
About 1,000 issues have gone online so far. The digitizers began with issues from the 1930s and the 1960s and have added some from the 1940s and the 1970s. Eventually, Mr. Schmidt hopes, most of the paper’s entire run will be digitized.
Nobody has yet come forward and objected to having embarrassing youthful work or peccadilloes made digitally available, he said.
On the contrary, “this made a splash on campus,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Alumni love it.”
