Thousands of historical Southern Alberta newspapers made digitally available

Cameron, System Supports Specialist at the U of L Library, says the historical preservation of newspapers is important.

“We started [SANC] quite a while ago, but to be able to continue to add to it provides context and the ability for people to do research, especially in our history department or our local genealogy society,” says Cameron. “It just gives them a lot of information and the ability to track down family members or see what kind of events were happening or just see what was happening any given day in history.”

To date, more than 50,000 individual pages of newsprint have been added to the SANC, encompassing 35 different newspapers in the region.

Cameron explains that many of the papers had already been put into microfilm, which he describes as the archival standard as it is meant to last forever. They have contracted Backstage Library Works in Provo, Utah, to do much of the digitization work.

“They scanned all the microfilm and then they go through and clean up the images and run a process called OCRing, which stands for Optical Character Recognition,” says Cameron. “It goes through and reads the document and then they actually go back and correct the typings and spelling… so that, when these are added to our collection, they’re fully text-searchable.”

The oldest newspaper that is available on the service is The Lethbridge News. It features The Lethbridge News paper that was originally published 137 years ago on December 4, 1885.

In that edition, an article highlighted a proposal that aimed to create the city’s first police detachment. The author notes that “Lethbridge and other places have been obliged to put up with the miserably inadequate protection of a corporal’s file or less.”

Another piece in The Lethbridge News was about a judge in Battleford, Saskatchewan ordering the executions of eight “Indian murderers” by hanging.

Cameron says it was interesting for him to read the comic strips that were included in many old newspapers, particularly the ones that are not “appropriate” or “politically correct” in today’s landscape.

Whether or not the SANC will continue to be expanded with additional content will depend on their ability to secure more funding. Cameron tells LNN that this work is expensive.

The Southern Alberta Newspaper Collection can be accessed on the U of L Library website.

READ MORE: Lethbridge News Now

by David Opinko

Thousands of historical Southern Alberta newspapers made digitally available

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