For those eager to recall their years on College Hill or curious about campus buzz across the ages, tracking down the right headlines has traditionally been a tedious affair. Whether for information on the "protest years" of the late sixties, the David Horowitz anti-reparations ad scandal of 2001 or other notable pieces of Brown lore, one used to have to sift through The Brown Daily Herald print archives housed in the John Hay Library.
But soon, a trip to the Herald archives will require nothing more than a click of the mouse.
In a joint venture with the University Library, The Herald is beginning to digitize its annals year by year, with the intention of ultimately making the whole archives viewable and keyword searchable - for students, alums, professors and other researchers - from the newspaper's and the University Library's Web sites. A pilot project has been completed, but former Herald staffers involved in the process and library officials say the archives' full digitization hinges on further fund-raising.
Those involved in the project say The Herald has no current plans to digitize the Pembroke Record, the newspaper of the former neighboring women's college, which published its last issue in 1971.
For the pilot, University archivists have cut some of The Herald's backlogs from their bindings and shipped them off to Digital Divide Data, a company that specializes in scanning and processing documents for word recognition. An initial six academic years of the newspaper - 1891-92, 1903-1904, 1918-1919, 1941-1942, 1968-1969 and the spring semester of 1987 - were selected for the initial run. Earlier this month, the pilot became publicly available, on the Web site of the University Library's Center for Digital Initiatives.
The digitization project began last fall when the large outgoing editorial board started looking for ways they could leave a lasting impact at The Herald, said former Senior Editor Anne Wootton '08.5. After researching similar projects at peer institutions, Wootton said she brought the proposed project to an enthusiastic Herald board of directors. The Herald had recently received a donation earmarked specifically for digitization from Kristie Miller '66, a former managing editor.
"The importance of this project has always been recognized, but it wasn't always possible," Wootton said.
Miller's donation covered the $10,000 price tag of the pilot. But the project's future depends on the ability to conjure up more funds.
"The future of this project is entirely dependent upon successful fund-raising," Wootton said. She and other former Herald editors said their fund-raising aspirations are "agnostic" but that they expect mostly to garner contributions from Brown alums interested in creating a digital window back to their days on College Hill, or from former Herald staff members keen on preserving their work.
The going price? Any of the 120 years of The Herald's publication can be digitized for about $5,000, Wootton said.
Senior Library Specialist Gayle Lynch, who has worked in the University Archives for 40 years, said she regularly receives requests for copies of bygone issues of The Herald. Vague recollections and ballpark guesses on distant dates mean she spends lots of time searching for memories in the hard-copy volumes at the John Hay Library. She also says some of the more recent issues of the newspaper are actually more prone to damage because they are printed on acidic paper of poor quality.
Lynch said she sees a strong alumni demand for The Herald's digitization, noting that when she charges alums for their copies of the newspaper, they often send substantial donations in return.
"I never thought I'd live long enough to see them digitized," Lynch said of the old newspapers.
Though a complete set of the Pembroke Record is on file at the archives in the Hay, University Archivist Jay Gaidmore said the papers are in particularly poor condition and would benefit greatly from digitization.
While The Herald's digitization plans do not currently include the Pembroke Record, the project's student leaders say they hope to eventually incorporate that paper's run into The Herald's digital repository.
"It's just a matter of finding donors interested in supporting the Record," said former Herald Editor-in-Chief Mary-Catherine Lader '08.
"We're pleased that the University Archives have the physical copies (of the Pembroke Record), but of course, we'd love to see them digitized because that would make them easily searchable and protected for posterity," said Christy Law Blanchard, director of alumni affairs at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.
Newspapers at peer universities such as Yale and the University of Michigan have been undertaking similar digitization projects in recent years. The Harvard Crimson also partnered with Digital Divide Data to make their archives available online, but in text-only format.
But the user interface and the file format of the forthcoming online Herald archives - which will allow text searches while preserving photographs and advertisements - will make the project's results "top of the line," Wootton said. The Herald has a leg up on other universities' projects because of the groundwork laid by the experience and expertise of Brown's library staff, Lader said.
Patrick Yott, director the library's Center for Digital Initiatives, said that his unit's experience in digitizing and displaying other library archives online has helped make the Herald project run smoothly thus far.
Those involved in the digitization project from both ends - The Herald and the library - see the partnership as a fruitful one with the shared goal of preserving a measure of Brown's history. But given the strict independence of The Herald from the University, they also stress the strictly business nature of the relationship. A contract negotiated between Herald lawyers and the University counsel will ensure that the newspaper will retain its intellectual property and front the costs for the project, while the library will lend its expertise and develop its archives.
University Librarian Harriette Hemmasi said that the library has undertaken similar partnerships before, always with the foremost intention of making archived information more accessible.
"If (The Herald) hadn't come to us, it's something we would have done soon anyways," Hemmasi said of the digitization project. While the online archives of the newspaper will make access a much more efficient process, she said, her experience with digitization suggests that the hard copies won't go by the wayside. Rather, artifacts' easy digital access usually makes demand for the original even greater, she said.
"It's nothing like seeing the artifact itself," Hemmasi said of the digital archives. "A lot of people like to see the real thing."
As for The Herald's digitization, the pilot project will be on demonstration during Commencement in kiosks at the Rockefeller and Sciences libraries from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Wootton, Lader and Yott will hold a forum on the project on Saturday at 11 a.m. in the John Hay Library.
