The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle has made its entire archive digital and searchable, back to the first printing of the newspaper in 1786.

Every piece of microfilm from every issue of The Chronicle (Monday-Thursday, 69,023; Friday 83,383; Sunday 93,973) has been scanned and made accessible via the Internet — over 1.2 million pages — turning the South’s oldest newspaper into an important resource accessible from computers worldwide.

With the help of Morris Digital Works’ Digital BackFile, newspapers across the country can gain electronic access to text and images from long before the electronic age.
Courtesy of The Augusta Chronicle

“My role has been creator of this,” said Augusta Chronicle Chief Librarian Rhonda Hollimon of her part in the expansive digital archiving project, which started small but has since grown to become an entire product marketed and provided by Morris Communications Corp.’s subsidiary Morris Digital Works.

“Several years ago, I was doing some genealogical research and it was taking forever,” Hollimon said. “People go through this all the time, and there had to be a better way to do it. I started looking at ways to go about scanning or in some way digitizing [pages].”

Hollimon and her coworkers tested the idea by scanning a small number of pages and eventually taking the process to the paper’s entire archive. AugustaArchives.com contains the entire history of the newspaper.

From a business and marketing perspective, the technologies involved in what Morris Digital Works can provide a newspaper with can bring a recoup on investment in a few years, and can greatly increase public awareness and paper brand recognition, the company’s Web site says. For individuals seeking information, the advantage may be far greater.

Available for a fee, The Chronicle’s online archive is currently composed of TIFF images of each issue, scanned and searchable as a result of optical character recognition technology used during the scanning process. Hollimon said that her newspaper has had people as far away as Australia sign up to access the archives.

While the decision was made to go with the TIFF file format at the beginning of the project, changes in technology and file compatibility resulted in the decision to convert all of the TIFF files into PDFs, in order to ensure a broader spectrum of compatibility for those wishing to access the archives.

“We initially went with TIFF because our online director at that time said ‘I think we should go with TIFF,’” Hollimon said. “When we had it in-house it wasn’t an issue — when we were serving it up to the multitudes, we had it in TIFF format and we ran into some problems.”

Problems included accessibility issues with military institutions and other groups maintaining stricter controls over the types of data allowed to enter and exit computer networks. With the archives stored as TIFF files, viewing them required a proprietary viewer that needed to be loaded by the computer attempting to access the archives. Tighter IT controls resulted in decreased access and greater incompatibility issues.

“We didn’t have a ton of those [problems],” Hollimon said, “but we didn’t want to have any, so we said ‘everyone has Acrobat, let’s convert to PDF.’ We were at a point where there was some new OCR technology, and we said ‘let’s make this a situation where we kill more than one bird with this stone.’”

With higher OCR quality in a more easily accessible file format, Hollimon and her coworkers made the archiving experience easier for the end user. Additionally, the group added a highlighting feature to search results, which showcases the location of keywords in documents retrieved from searches. The goal is to have The Chronicle’s entire TIFF-to-PDF conversion project completed by October.

“The readership response has been really strong,” said Conan Gallaty, The Chronicle’s new media director. “We get individuals who are bound and determined to find old articles on family members, events in the past, etc. It’s amazing — the history buffs come out of the woodwork when something like this launches.”

The Chronicle has sold archive access to the local library, which provides free access for the public. Users are able to print out copies of search results or even e-mail them to friends and relatives interested in seeing the results, instead of dealing with the inconvenience of having to make a trip to The Chronicle’s library if they live outside of Augusta.

“Whenever I go in [the library] there are always people using the system. They see the benefit and it saves them time,” Gallaty said.

Morris is looking at expanding the archiving project to all of its other newspapers. Holliman said she is very excited about the conclusion of the project, and realizes its scope and potential impact, not only her community, but also for anyone with a computer.

“It’s great. We are the first to go live with something of this sort. We’re the South’s oldest newspaper, so we’re going to be a preeminent source forever, because there are not going to be a lot of newspapers out there who will ever be able to say ‘we have our archives back to 1786 on line,’ because they didn’t exist in 1786,” Hollimon said.

“It’s great to know that we were able to take the newspaper here in Augusta, Ga., [and] find the resources within the company. We didn’t hire any new people for this, amazingly enough. We did it with staff that we already had. It’s pretty neat stuff.

Technology that is able to bring centuries-old information to anyone around the world has a potential to substantially benefit both the newspapers whose content is being shared and the public. Whether searches are genealogical, political, or merely borne of subtle curiosity, archives such as the one that The Augusta Chronicle has put together bring a vast amount of information to anyone interested.

“If we can make it work here, then it will be proven to newspapers that this is something that needs to be part of their daily offering,” Gallaty offered.

One newspaper down, many more to go.