Past and future meet in archives
A trove of Columbus history that will benefit our community far into the future soon will be available in ways that we couldn't have imagined a few years ago.
One is old-fashioned and the other seems almost futuristic, given that we're talking about the preservation and accessibility of ink-on-paper newspapers that contain the history of Columbus from the mid1800s forward.
The old-fashioned archives are bound volumes of Columbus newspapers that the Wolfe family, former owners of The Dispatch, had preserved in storerooms and warehouses for decades. Last week, we gave hundreds of them to the Columbus Historical Society so that it eventually can make them available to researchers. I'll explain that in more detail shortly.
The futuristic archives are digital. When GateHouse Media bought The Dispatch in 2015, one of the first things our new corporate leaders did was to ask NewsBank Media Services, the company that has been microfilming Dispatch pages for decades, to "digitize" everything on all of those pages back to the very beginning of the newspaper.
The monumental task of scanning those papers is finally done — nearly 2 million pages going back to July 1, 1871. And that means that we — and you — soon will no longer have to wade through mountains of microfilm in tedious, time-consuming searches for stories, obituaries, photos or advertisements from century-old papers.
Instead, we now have a way to conduct keyword searches of those old pages to find people and companies and all sorts of other information. Research that would have taken hours or days in
the past now can be done in seconds, and when the results appear, the information is in the form of images of those stories on the page. So, while we can harness the power of modern computer technology to find the stories, when we arrive at them, we will see them as readers saw them in 1871, or 1907, or whatever year comes up in the search.
We are just learning ourselves how this works and working with NewsBank to determine how we will make this valuable tool and information available more broadly, so we'll share more details as we learn more.
At the same time NewsBank was doing the digital scanning, Dispatch researcher and library director Julie Fulton was working with the Dispatch facilities staff to pull together from various warehouses all of the hundreds of bound volumes of newspapers owned by The Dispatch.
This was forced in part because some of them were in buildings owned by the previous owners of the newspaper, and they wanted to use that space for other purposes. Some of it was decided by a need to cut costs, and it made no sense to pay thousands of dollars a year to store those newspapers — virtually all of which had been recorded on microfilm — in a secure storage facility. (Not only did we pay a hefty monthly fee for storage, but we also had to pay a retrieval fee each time we wanted to look at our own papers.)
Also, because those big books full of papers were kept offsite, they were virtually never used by us in the newsroom or by anyone else. We might as well have been paying to store bricks, because their inaccessibility rendered them worthless as research materials.
As Fulton and the facilities team moved the bound volumes from other sites to our facilities, she reviewed and cataloged every book. Because we have hundreds of volumes of The Dispatch alone, she recommended that we keep those and donate the non-Dispatch titles to the historical society.
Those titles include The Ohio State Journal, The Columbus Citizen, The Citizen-Journal and a host of titles that even most old-timers in Columbus probably won't remember: The Columbus Daily Express, The Daily Monitor, The Daily Press, The Press Post and The Columbus News, to name a few.
In all, we donated about 620 bound volumes. About 48 percent of them are Ohio State Journals (which was owned by the Wolfe family before it bought The Dispatch, and which eventually merged with the Citizen to become the Citizen-Journal). About 43 percent of the collection are copies of The Columbus Citizen and Citizen-Journal. And about 9 percent are the other titles.
Retired Dispatch sports columnist Bob Hunter, who is a historical society board member, organized a bucket-brigade-style human chain to move the big books from a Dispatch truck to the society's new home on West Town Street. Among the volunteers were current and former reporters, some of whose work appeared in some of the papers they were helping move.
"There's a real appreciation that these are a part of local history and that we need to preserve them," Hunter said.
The historical society was excited to receive the collection, said President Mike Frush. "Every one of our historians, when they heard about the offer from The Dispatch, said we had to do this. We're extremely pleased to have them and to eventually make them available, as much as we are able, to researchers."
The papers are delicate, and some are extremely fragile, so it will take the historical society some time to figure out how best to make them available.
"We will treasure them," Frush said.