THE CORONADO PUBLIC LIBRARY NEWSPAPER DIGITIZATION PROJECT

In 2012 we began investigating how we could digitize our holdings of various Coronado newspapers on microfilm. We had newspapers going back to 1887, when Coronado was first being developed, going up to the present. As might be expected, several newspapers had come and gone or had been absorbed into each other, and in one period there was no newspaper at all. All of them had been weeklies. What was certain was using the microfilm reader-printer was cumbersome. Only one person could use it at a time by coming into the Library. While we had been compiling our own index to the newspapers, this primarily covered the recent past, and it left much to be desired. The technology of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as a keyword searching tool was very tantalizing. The costs, however, of digitizing and indexing our entire collection of well over 100 reels of microfilm was daunting. We insisted on National standards being applied.

We were fortunate to have made contact with and explored our options through the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) based at the University of California at Riverside. Working with its head, Brian Geiger, we continued discussions through a two year period as we explored financial options. We were supported in our efforts to make this a viable possibility through a bequest from Judith Bond. Judith had been a regular library user and had worked as an archivist at the famous Hotel del Coronado. Her family was supportive of this project, and once we received an estimate from Brian at CDNC, we knew we could have them process 120 reels, covering 1887 through 2013. Grayscale would be used to have good quality reproduction of the newspaper graphics (as good as we could get from microfilm). Before we went any further, the library director Christian Esquevin talked with the publisher of the current newspaper of the Coronado Eagle-Journal. He had started the more recent Eagle newspaper but had bought out the Coronado Journal, which included copyright to that newspaper and several amalgamated papers back to public domain in 1922. It was necessary to get his permission in order to have article-level indexing of the newspapers. Dean Eckenroth had had a long and positive relationship with the director and the Coronado Library and was happy to grant this request.

At this point the Historical Newspaper project involved sending all of our microfilm reels to UC Riverside (these were our back-up duplicates). The reels would be outsourced for scanning and digitizing, and then processed with a proprietary program to index for keyword and article-level searching. This process took a year. Our microfilm holdings represented nine newspapers and several other title changes with over 120,000 pages of newsprint. Extra time was spent in segregating a couple of short-term newspaper publications and in editing all of the results. .All images in the newspapers were included and their metadata indexed.

When the first test results first appeared we were not disappointed. The ability to do searching on the web and find full-text pages and articles from Coronado newspapers was exhilarating. It seemed like time stood still before all the newspapers were completed and the results became available on the CDNC, and with a link from our website. The public response has been tremendous. The project has been covered in the Coronado Eagle-Journal newspaper and use of the newspaper database has been heavy. We hope to extend the same coverage of the newspaper from 2013 through most of 2018, going directly from its digital source to its indexing process at CDNC, and thanks to Dean Eckenroth at the Coronado Eagle newspaper. This project has been one of the most successful and gratifying special projects ever conducted by the Coronado Public Library.