Newspaper Migrations

A newspaper archive can be an extremely daunting collection to migrate or digitize. If you’re thinking about Hyku or Hyrax as your next platform, consider joining the Samvera Newspaper Interest Group.

If you’re at step one and still needing to digitize your newspapers look into the National Digital Newspaper Program. This joint effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress offers a wide array of information on digitization as well as grants to help with the work. For a concise best practices document for digitization, check out the California Digital Newspaper Collection’s guide. There’s also helpful documentation about preservation available from Educopia: “Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness”.

If you’re wondering how others have moved their newspapers out of CONTENTdm here’s articles about how University of Utah and Central Michigan University did it.

• Massive Newspaper Migration — Moving 22 Million Records from CONTENTdm to Solphal
  Alan Witkowski, Anna Neatrour, Jeremy Myntti and Brian McBride
  J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
• Central Michigan University Digital Collections convert from CONTENTdm to Veridian
  Kuan-Yu (Jeffrey) Ke, Project Leader, DL Consulting Ltd.

IMLS, who make Bridge2Hyku possible, have given University of Utah and Boston Public Library a grant for “Newspapers in Hydra.”

The project will create: (1) a shareable, system- and programming-language-agnostic RDF-based data model addressing structural and descriptive metadata features unique to digitized newspapers; (2) a set of modular, open-source plugins for the popular Hydra/Fedora digital repository framework for ingesting, describing, discovering, displaying, and disseminating digitized newspaper content; and (3) a community of practitioners — including developers, librarians, content specialists, and managers — dedicated to addressing challenges and collaborating on best practices associated with managing digitized newspapers. http://samvera.org/2017/04/19/imls-grants-two-hydra-related-projects/

If your technically inclined, check out their progress on github here: https://github.com/marriott-library/newspaper_works.