More than 100,000 pages of historical Maine newspapers will be digitized and made available online through a two-year, $275,000 grant the Maine State Library is getting from from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The state library’s Adam Fisher says the project will involve creating digital images of Master microfilm copies of newspapers printed prior to 1923, after which copyright starts to apply for publications.
Fisher says the masters are located in a variety of places.
“They’re in libraries and historical societies. Some are held out of state. Some may actually be held by the newspapers themselves,” he says. “We’ve identified some of them, but it’s a small portion in terms of what’s out there as far as where the master files are located.”
Fisher says the quality is especially important because the image will be run though software that will allow all the words to be indexed and searched.
“Quality is important because when you take a newspaper and you microfilm it what you’re doing is making the image much smaller to fit onto that film,” he says. “When we digitize it we’re looking to blow it back up again and get a decent quality image.”
