On Monday, The Columbian’s digital archives became available to the public for the first time, allowing users to search with keywords and date ranges.
The archives, available at columbian.newspapers.com, open up a new world for historians, students and curious Clark County residents who may want to search for their own names, an ancestor’s name, addresses, or a date of a specific paper or an event.
“The digital newspaper archives are a really great resource,” said Donna Sinclair, history professor at Washington State University Vancouver. “They bring life to the past.”
The Columbian archives from 1890 to 2011 are available for $7.95 a month. The public can also access the archives on a computer at the Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St., with a standard admission price of $5 for adults and $4 for seniors and students.
The Columbian’s digital archives are the first Clark County-specific online newspaper archives available after 1884 (The Vancouver Independent’s archives are at newspapers.com for the years 1875-1884).
“Having these archives available and easily searchable cuts down research time so much,” said Katie Bush, public historian at the Clark County Historical Museum. “You can find interesting stories so much more quickly and stories you thought you could never find.”
The Columbian explored a few options for digitizing its archives in the past, but cost-prohibitive scanning equipment, labor, software and data storage prevented it from happening sooner. Newspapers.com set up a revenue-sharing deal with The Columbian that allowed most of the revenue from archives access to go toward The Columbian and support its local journalism.
Newspapers.com, owned by ancestry.com, scanned The Columbian’s microfilm archives at a Utah facility over the last four months and used optical character recognition software to identify each letter on every scanned page. It allows users to search for specific keywords. The archives include news articles, marriage announcements, advertisements, birth announcements, obituaries, and local sports articles and scores.
“It’s a great opportunity to get to know the community and the people who lived here before,” Bush said.
Historians and students previously had to use microfilm or microfiche projectors to scan through each roll of film, a slow and inefficient way to find information without a specific date of an event.
Sinclair, who teaches history classes at WSUV, said that the online archives will save historians and students time, opening up new ways for them to discover stories.
“I plan on developing an exercise where there’s a timeline or history of a place, and students are looking at material in The Columbian,” Sinclair said.
Other archives projects
At the Clark County Historical Museum, Bush and other workers and volunteers are using their own custom-built scanner to photograph The Columbian’s paper archives. Although the project will take years, it will allow a better-quality version of The Columbian to exist digitally.
The museum also plans to scan and use optical character recognition for The Camas Post-Record, The Battle Ground Reflector, The Vancouver Sun and an old Washougal newspaper, according to Executive Director Bradley Richardson.
“They’ll be preservation-style copies with the brownish color,” said Richardson. “It’s much more intensive in capturing the image and content.”
Paul Speer was the major donor for the project, which cost around $5,000, and Hewlett-Packard engineer Ken Williams designed the scanner, Richardson said. The museum is seeking volunteers to help with the archiving project.
“It’s amazing to see the energy and excitement around the digital archives,” Richardson said.
