BRUCE COUNTY – During Archives Awareness Week last week, the Bruce County Archives at the Bruce County Museum and Cultural Centre announced its extensive newspaper digitization project aimed at preserving the county’s historical news and making it more accessible to the public.
The project will include the digitization of up to 12 historic Bruce County newspapers from their earliest years of operation dating back to around the 1930s. The project will launch later this year with the digitized papers available for viewing on a new BCM&CC web resource, enabling the public to easily browse and search their contents from the comfort of their homes.
“Hundreds of people per year visit the museum for research purposes, accessing news on microfilm, or in original hard copy,” said Deb Sturdevant, archivist at the BCM&CC. “This project will allow more people to do their research by using easy keyword searches to help them find that needle in the haystack piece of information they’re looking for.”
Funding for the Bruce County Municipal Modernization Program (Intake 2) Projects is provided in part by the Province of Ontario. Additional funding for the project is also provided in part by the Federal Museum Assistance Program. The project is set to conclude before the end of 2022.
Sturdevant noted “the digitization will serve to both preserve the papers (through TIFF files) and to make the papers’ content more accessible to the public (through PDF files with applied optical character recognition). Once digitized, the newspapers will be uploaded to a new BCM&CC website enabling the general public to both browse the papers and search the contents. Digitization is occurring from both master negative microfilm reels, which we have sourced from a microfilm vendor, municipal heritage group, and our collection, and from original papers where microfilm of a reasonable quality does not exist.”
Prior to the pandemic, the archives received an average of 660 in-person researcher visits per year. An estimated 40 per cent of researcher visits include accessing newspapers, with the assistance of archives staff, on microfilm or in original hardcopy for their research. Many more individuals would access the newspapers if they could conduct keyword searching to help them find that “needle in a haystack” piece of information about their research subject.
Due to the geographical size of the county, not every Bruce County resident can access this valuable resource by travelling to the BCM&CC in Southampton. In addition, many former residents or people with connections to Bruce County, now living in other places, find it difficult to travel here to access resources.
Last year, over 54,000 users visited collections.brucemuseum.ca from all over the world to look for descriptions of items available to view in the research room and to browse images of artefacts, historic photographs, letters, diaries, and more.
“We expect that many people will also be interested in exploring the newspaper site when it becomes available as well,” said Sturdevant.
She noted that over the past few years, staff have received an increasing number of comments and requests from researchers expressing their desire to have access to digitized Bruce County newspapers. Due to advances in technology and trends in libraries and archives, many public libraries and archives have begun newspaper digitization projects, and access to digitized newspapers is gradually becoming an expectation of the public.
As a point of interest – the oldest Bruce County issue in the collection is The Bruce Weekly Herald, Walkerton, Aug. 13, 1861.
