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.
