Saving 12 million pages of Iowa newspaper history is hard. Seeing it all online may be harder.
It was hot news for history buffs in the last week as the State Historical Society of Iowa unveiled a partnership with a Cedar Rapids company to digitize more than 12 million pages of newspapers dating back to the 1830s, before statehood.
The news was met with a mix of thrill and worry, which I'll get to in a minute. But first let me boil this down to the core emotion behind the interest.
Take, for instance, the town of Stuart situated along Interstate Highway 80 west of Des Moines. It already spent about $15,000 to digitize its newspapers, as old as 1872, through Advantage Cos. — the same Cedar Rapids firm working with the state. Open online access with a keyword search is provided through stuart.advantage-preservation.com.
Within a few seconds of searching the Stuart Herald I turned up a reference to my own mother and grandparents, from Atlantic, attending a local family dinner in 1955 to salute a cousin’s induction into the military.
Such a quick, easy drill down to such specific and intimate genealogical detail — everyday folk history that only local newspapers captured pre-Facebook — is the precious holy grail.
Or take the example of Dianne Raveling, a 65-year-old grandmother in Sibley who in the last 20 years has become one of Iowa's venerable, valuable amateur historians.
Her initial curiosity about the little village of Cloverdale southeast of Sibley set her off on a journey in which she combed through all the local newspaper microfilm from 1873 to 1950 and eventually began to compile topical research documents and offer her help to anybody who asked.
“I spent hours at that library," she said, "getting a sore neck sitting there on that chair."
For history zealots like Raveling, the ability to accurately browse local archives from the convenience of home is second only to breathing.
So it’s her voice that echoes in my head as I try to explain why 12 million pages of digitized newspapers are significant and how this process may actually work.
Raveling also happened to be the first person to comment this past week when I posted this news in the Forgotten Iowa Historical Society Facebook group — a devoted throng of 27,500 fans and counting. The group was founded by Daniel Wetherell, a librarian in the small O’Brien County town of Sutherland.
You might wonder: So, does the state's announcement mean that Raveling, Wetherell and their ilk soon will enjoy free and open online access to all these newspapers?
Answer: No, although this deal does take significant steps in that direction.
You also might wonder: Is this a good deal for Iowans who would like to see our public history preserved by rigorous standards?
Answer: Arguably, yes, with caveats. Plenty of details remain to be hashed out.
The state is loaning its 12 million pages to Advantage and retains ownership of the physical papers, microfilm and digital images. Advantage bears the cost of scanning and digitizing in exchange for potential profit.
A relationship between the state and Advantage already had been established with previous work. The company houses 32,000 reels of the state's newspaper microfilm (the majority of 44,000 total reels) in its climate-controlled vault in Cedar Rapids.
Advantage also already has digitized nearly 15 million Iowa newspaper pages across 140 individual collections. About 3.5 million of those pages are in the public domain, while another 2 or 3 million have been made available through agreements with publishers.
But Jeff Kiley, chief operating officer of Advantage, realizes that this big contract marks a major shift for his company.
“I feel a little bit like the minnow swallowing the whale right now,” he said.
What history buffs want is easy, comprehensive digital searching from anywhere. Access in person in Des Moines or Iowa City to the state's collection can't compete with that modern standard, no matter how convenient the hours of operation.
BROWSE ONLINE: Search Des Moines Register archives dating back to mid-1800s
But Advantage's newspaper preservation has catered to libraries storing microfilm — not the web-surfing public at large. A search portal for a mass online audience and the robust customer relations to support it weren't part of its initial business plan.
The online search function that Advantage still uses today was meant as nothing more than a makeshift digital solution for libraries' in-house computer terminals.
“It was only made into a web application as an afterthought once we realized the community's desire to make it more widely available outside of their library,” Kiley wrote in an answer to one of my follow-up questions.
Advantage — in its work with 260 Iowa libraries among 1,000 nationwide — has long since picked up on the public’s thirst for universal online search.
But individual online subscriptions don't drive Advantage’s business. The company’s budget is based on the number of film reels it preserves from month to month. There aren’t enough paying history nerds in Iowa to fund an online subscription model based only on the state's newspapers. That’s a big national game. (The Newspapers.com site tallies 226 titles in Iowa and 4,739 nationwide.)
Kiley is trying to develop a model that might revolve more around education and classrooms. He sees local libraries, schools, businesses and grant sources strung together to fund projects that would benefit students as well as adult historians. And a better online search should arrive in 2018.
Advantage is tasked with the tricky job of helping communities bundle this funding, as well as negotiating agreements with all the individual publishers.
Content before 1924 is in the public domain. But aggressively posting all possible content online would be to shoot himself in the foot, Kiley said, because he needs publishers' goodwill.
The inclusion of more recent history under publishers' control helps make things relevant to new generations of students.
“There’s that gray fine line between what is right and what is legal,” Kiley added.
I could rattle on for a little less than 12 million pages and still not hit every point. But to clarify a few harsh realities:
The digitization process doesn’t capture every single word on every page, depending on image quality. Kiley estimated that perhaps half the content ends up searchable by keyword, to say nothing of photos. So there could be more mentions of my mom and grandparents in the Stuart newspaper that I would find only by manually poring over each and every page.
The state has “format neutrality” with these newspapers, said State Archivist Anthony Jahn, who helped orchestrate this deal. In other words, the brittle newspapers themselves aren’t the essential artifacts — the content is key. Once the papers have been preserved on microfilm and digitized, the state will offer them back to local communities or, as a last resort, securely destroy them.
Before this solution, the state in recent years had been building up an annual backlog of more than 100,000 newspaper pages per year that weren't being preserved.
All this begs the big-picture question of whether the state years ago should have more aggressively funded newspaper digitization and bolstered in-house expertise. But with all the bigger money fights being waged this year at the Capitol, I feel like we've long since crossed that Rubicon. Which makes this exploratory alliance with an Iowa company a practical, belated solution.
I also have to note that as a Register journalist I’ve seen firsthand in my own industry the struggles over how and when to preserve our own printed archives. We're no saints.
Raveling said that she will be the most thrilled history buff of them all as more of these pages make their way online.
I’ll be keeping her and her meticulous habits in mind as we watch this 12 million-page deal take shape.
Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson) and on Snapchat (@kylemunsoniowa).