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Libraries digitize WB newspapers; 56 years available and searchable
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · May 27, 2016
The first day the West Branch Times’ historical archives came out in digital format, a couple stopped by the West Branch Public Library trying to track down their great-grandfather, who lived in the area on a farm.
Library staff took them to the online files, and found he lived in Springdale.
Library Director Nick Shimmin, who headed up the $2,000 project, said he’s “excited to have this” — searchable archives of West Branch’s newspapers from 1878 to 1934.
The archives can be found at westbranch.advantage-preservation.com.
Shimmin approached this reporter, the newspaper’s editor, in 2014 with the idea, asking for permission to proceed, which was eagerly granted. Today, Co-Publisher of West Branch Communications Jake Krob said he is pleased to see the site up and running.
“We are so grateful to the library for taking on this project,” Krob said. “It’s a great new asset for the community.”
Krob noted that the Mount Vernon library digitized Times’ sister newspaper, the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun, a couple years ago, “and it’s been wildly successful.”
“It’s used often for research – whether someone is doing genealogy or someone is looking for information about a business’s history.”
Shimmin applied for a $10,000 grant from Alliant Energy’s foundation and received $2,000, which was enough to “get a start on it,” covering about 56 years of the newspapers’ history. There have been three newspapers in West Branch – The Index, the West Branch Local Record (later shortened to The Local Record), and the West Branch Times.
The Index began in May 1869 but was only printed “occasionally” or “semi-occasionally,” according to “West Branch: The First 150 Years.”
According to “The First 150 Years,” the West Branch Times began April 1, 1875, but was sold and renamed the West Branch Local Record.
The West Branch Local Record put out its first paper in Oct. 3, 1873, then shortened its name to The Local Record starting with the May 17, 1883, edition.
Under yet another owner, the paper returned to the name West Branch Times on April 4, 1889, and has published under that name ever since.
As a point of reference, the city was officially established in 1851.
The Hoover archives has every issue of the West Branch Local Record and The Local Record, and has all of the Times starting with April 11, 1889. All of those papers up to and including the June 14, 1934, Times are in this first round of digital archives.
The digital archives provide visitors with both a photograph of the original newspaper and a searchable text.
The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum maintains the most extensive archives of the West Branch Times, so Shimmin started by meeting with Director Thomas Schwartz, archivist Matt Schaefer and Education Specialist Elizabeth Dinschel. They agreed that if only part of the files could be digitized, the greatest need lies in the oldest and most “fragile,” Shimmin said. All of the oldest papers have been photographed for microfilm, but even that can age and deteriorate.
Shimmin contracted with Advantage Preservation, a company he said has a strong reputation with historians and archivists, and a representative with the Hoover Library volunteered to accompany the microfilm when it went for scanning. Scanning took a day, and preparing the online searchable database took about a week and a half, he said; the site went live on May 6.
“We did enough to cover Hoover’s presidency,” Shimmin noted.
Shimmin sent in logos of the participating groups to add to the site, and he plans to add a link to the page to the library web site.
“Congratulations on seeing this through,” Schaefer told Shimmin after the project’s completion. “It will be a great asset to folks who are interested in local history, genealogy and West Branch. Very cool.”
The searchable database is not perfect, as some of the old papers were wrinkled or torn in a way that appears as marks on the scanned page, which can confuse Optical Character Recognition programs, Shimmin said.
Shimmin said viewing pictures of actual newspaper pages will overcome most of that, but he would be interested in volunteers transcribing manually to improve the search engine results.
On the Web:
westbranch.advantage-preservation.com
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