Sept.
 2004

The Civil War-era archives of The Philadelphia Inquirer will be made publicly available this fall following a showcase digitization project backed by Knight Ridder Digital and Olive Software Inc.

The electronic archives will contain The Inquirer’s wartime reporting from 1860 to 1865, according to Ken Doctor, vice president for content services at Knight Ridder Digital.

The project is the first of a wave of digitization endeavors KRD plans to undertake among Knight Ridder newspapers.

When The Inquirer’s archive conversion is complete, users will be able to perform keyword searches of more than 12,500 newspaper pages chronicling the United States’ bloodiest conflict.

In addition to coverage of the Gettysburg Address, the newspaper’s reporting included eyewitness accounts from the battlefields.

Microfilm storing pages from 1860 to 1865 was digitized with Olive’s PipeX microfilm digitization process, which will let readers view, search and print articles and photos as they appeared 144 years ago. PipeX is used in conjunction with Olive’s ActivePaper archiving app to preserve all the elements of a newspaper’s page into one XML repository, which can be easily accessed by standard Web browsing software.

Doctor declined to disclose the digitization project’s costs.

New tactics

The Inquirer project is, in part, a new tactic for Knight Ridder Digital to target eras of interest for librarians and historians across the country, Doctor said of the project.

KRD’s Content Services syndicates an average of 1,500 news stories a day, which are used for research by enterprise, and academic users.

Doctor said Knight Ridder newspapers have had a text-based archive service program for its newspapers’ Web sites going back to 1995.

The articles, sold either on a per-article or bundle basis, are available from each newspapers’ Web site, Doctor said. Up to 1,000 articles can be sold at a time.

“That has been a good, steady business for us for nearly 10 years,” he said. “When we saw the Olive technology we saw that there could be a new product line created and that is creating a visual archive of the newspaper.”

A slice of newspaper history

Doctor said The Inquirer’s Civil War-era archive illustrates the potential value of digitizing significant historical events.

“Lets take some high-passion vertical products and create those, get them out in the marketplace and let’s look at how we can sell them to libraries and [make them accessible] to consumers with a price model that works in the marketplace,” he said.

By contrast, digitizing the entire 3-million-page Inquirer archive wouldn’t make economic sense, he said.

“Knight Ridder’s approach is to take a conservative path, but look where we can be innovative and we think we can do that in certain vertical products,” Doctor said.

Digitizing archives is the logical route most newspapers will have to take to enable users to peruse historical editions.

Microfilm is difficult to use and can degrade over time. Doctor said within 20 years almost all dailies will have their content digitized and thus, available to users via the Web.

“The business question is how do we get from here to there in a way that is going to be profitable? And that is something we’re all weighing in the industry,” Doctor said.