Newspapers are a great source of historical information, especially when flood, fires, crime or scandals are involved.
Ever wonder what happened when Queen Elizabeth came to open the University of Northern B.C.? What about the first traditional school in the City of Prince George? Or what about the tragic fire at the Columbus Hotel? Or the in-broad-daylight murder of Darren Munch?
These and other bits of history can be found through a free online database provided by the Prince George Library. The Prince George Newspapers Digitization Project is an initiative provided by the Prince George Public Library, the College of New Caledonia Library and the Geoffrey R. Weller Library at UNBC. Funding is also provided by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre's B.C. History Digitization Project as well as past support from the Prince George Citizen Newspaper.
The project started in 2005 and is an ongoing work in progress.
"It spans the history of the city from its incorporation up until 1976 or '77," said the library's public service manager Marc Saunders. "We've crunched the numbers and we would probably be done between seven and ten years from now. We're here to serve as a depository, so to speak, of newspapers and try to provide the best access possible."
Each year it cost between $30,000 and $40,000 to continue the project.
It took about three or four years to digitize the Citizen from 1916 to 1962 but then when it went to a daily newspaper, the volume of pages slowed down the process considerably.
"There was some technical issues," said chief librarian Allan Wilson. "Some of the microfilms were not very good, there were scratches to repair and so forth. Generally it's proceeded well."
There is one concern about the digital archive. It's not a really good way to keep a permanent record.
"Paper lasts 500 years, papyrus lasts a thousand, stone lasts for 5,000," said Wilson. "Digital media is actually very susceptible to degradation. Believe it or not a CD Rom is only good for about five years before it starts losing data. Digital media is susceptible to electronic pulses, solar flares, things like that, so you have to have a way of protecting this because by the time we finish the Citizen it's going to cost several hundred thousand dollars to digitize it all. You wouldn't want to lose it to a solar flare or some kind of server accident."
So what the library does in cooperation with the partners is take a digital photograph of it, done in a variety of formats.
"The one you'll see on the library website will be done in a pdf, a jpeg and then the biggest is in the tiff format and those are all archived on the university servers and those are there as a form of insurance," said Wilson.
The university has climate controlled vaults for all their digital archives.
"We live in a different world now and the Prince George Citizen is really the newspaper of record, so really focusing on that paper and making sure that we've got that preserved for the generations that follow -- I think that's really important," said Saunders.
