Our history is told in a variety of ways. It’s told orally, through stories. In books, through the eyes of historians. And in newspapers, told by reporters.
Shawn Schollmeyer is doing her part to pass on Washington state history. She’s the coordinator of the Washington Digital Newspaper project at the state library in Olympia.
DN: So tell me about the program. How do you archive and why?
SS: Oh, that's a big question.
I work with a number of people. We have a number of subscriptions at the State Library. We collect and we microfilm, we preserve them. We have a state RCW mandate to collect and preserve newspapers published in our state and my particular role is the digital side. So I work with communities to help digitize their community newspapers and then I archive those to cloud storage where we preserve them for disaster recovery. Part of that is to also make them available online with publisher agreements so we can make them available to researchers.
DN: And so you've now hit a million pages that have been archived. Tell me about that.
SS: That's correct. We have a variety of different ways that we digitize our newspapers.
My Washington Digital Newspapers website is where I host as many as I can. I have a lot more that are going to be available soon. I partner with newspapers.com, one of the organizations I work with. They can digitize newspapers for me very quickly and then they will host them for a little while.
I agree to a three-year embargo and then once that expires, then either papers that are in the public domain prior to 1931 right now can go up online on our site. Then those that might be under copyright agreement, I work with the publishers to make sure that we've got their permission to put them up online for researchers. That all goes to another vendor who hosts these for us and we have a nice little update.
Since we hit this milestone, they have right on the front page the 1,071,214 pages that are available to people now.
DN: There was the Newport Miner, and I think there was another one in the Spokane area, Spokane Valley, or something like that.
So how do you come to agreements with newspapers like that, that you get a certain amount of their access to a certain amount of their stuff?
SS: Yeah, there's a number of different ways. One of these is the Industrial Worker. It's a labor paper. I've partnered with the University of Washington, who helped provide the microfilm for me to digitize. That one was published in Spokane and Seattle and that's in public domain.
The Fig Tree is another newspaper in Spokane. It's kind of a non-denominational Christian newspaper that is very positive in its news and approach and I'm working with that publisher directly. She may retire soon, so it's something that she feels is important to make sure it's available to people to research. So I work with her. I'm adding more issues over the next couple months from her paper.
The Newport Miner is one that I work with the publisher directly also. That publisher, Michelle Nedved, is someone who is happy to have us display and host that so people can look through the back archive, so I have an agreement with them. They are also working with me to start depositing more recent issues.
Some of those agreements go up to the last 30 days of publication, where after it's on their site for a little while, then they drop that e-edition directly to me in a certain software portal, and then my web vendor will help me make sure I comply with that 30-day agreement, and then we can put them up online directly.
So it's kind of a neat way to collect things directly from the publishers because they want to make sure that these are available to other researchers and journalists, educators, students—there's a variety of different users who have access to the newspapers once they're online.
DN: So you have to juggle a whole bunch of agreements with regard to, you know, different lookbacks and all that sort of stuff. It must be kind of a challenge to be able to juggle all of those, so to speak.
SS: That part isn't too bad, actually. Trying to find the publisher and get the agreement in the first place can be a challenge, just trying to meet with them because they can be so incredibly busy with tight schedules every week. But once I have the agreement, then I tuck that away.
You know, we are part of the Secretary of State's office, so we take those contracts very seriously, and we tuck them away so we know which papers we can put online when, and then it becomes more of an automated process. Some of it is we get up to a certain point and then it might be a little while before we add papers in the future, so those agreements vary quite a bit. We might just be doing a set amount of dates. So it really depends on the publisher and what they're comfortable with. Some publishers don't want to use newspapers.com. We do track those agreements, and we respect those wishes.
Maybe the more challenging ones are the ones that may have gone out of business, like back in the 1940s or 1950s. So, of course, we have to research the copyright, so that can be a bit more of a tracking nightmare is trying to figure out if there's any copyright still on a particular paper, or if it's, you know, fallen to a point where there's no current owner of the back archive.
One of them I have listed there is the Seattle Star. That's what we call kind of an orphan title. But because the copyright laws changed in 1963, I believe it was, that one is one we're able to put up a little more easily.
So we have to keep track of all the copyright changes at certain periods of time. That process I learned from our earlier grant with National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress. So we learned a lot of ways to track and verify from an earlier National Digital Newspaper grant program I was in.
We have a lot of standards that I use, a lot of expertise from other people who have gone before me. So nothing I'm recreating there, but it's something, fortunately, we are one of over 50 states and some territories that have learned this process as part of that earlier grant program. But now we're customizing it more and making it more Washington-centric, able to do things a little differently now that we're funded by Institute of Museum and Library Services. IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is a federal agency, and they provide grants to libraries and museums across the country.
The Washington State Library takes that federal funding and we channel it to different programs and to public libraries across the state. And then, especially with the public libraries, they get to choose what programs they want to do and how they use that funding. It can be for professional development, it could be for youth service programs, a variety of different things. So that money is very important to communities.
For the newspaper program, it allows me to consult with newspaper publishers, libraries, historical societies when they want to do a newspaper digitization project. So then I will travel all the way to Republic or over to Bellingham or other areas and talk to people about how to preserve those newspapers in their communities. If they want something online, then I talk to them about the usage and understanding the scope of a project and different aspects that might go into a project like this one that makes those historic resources available to the public.
DN: Have you ever had a publisher give you a flat-out no?
SS: Oh, sure. Sometimes it's not something they want to do or they've got the bandwidth to think about. A lot of times when I get approached about a project, it's from those historical societies in the communities. So I ask that those communities go back and talk to their publishers themselves. We want the publishers to understand it's the community request. It's not the state library or us initiating the projects, but there's genuine interest from the community to learn more about their community.
