On Tuesday, the University of Utah's Digital Technology Division began loading onto the Internet digitized copies of 19th century editions of The Salt Lake Tribune.
Other Utah newspapers, primarily weeklies, went onto the Internet beginning in 2002.
Starting today, computer users can begin reading pages of The Tribune from the 1870s. Next month, plan on pursuing The Tribune's 1880s news accounts and by early July, read and browse news stories from the 1890s.
For armchair historians, genealogists or folks who enjoy looking into the past, this is a respite from scanning old microfilms and yellowing newspapers.
"We are ahead of the pack in making historic Utah newspapers available to the general public over the Internet," said program Director John Herbert, about Utah Digital Newspapers' Web site at http://www.digitalnewspapers.org.
Type in "digital newspapers" in any Internet-search engines - Goggle, Yahoo or MSN - and the first three hits bring up the U.'s Web site, Herbert noted.
In 2002, the U.'s digital technology division started digitizing newspapers, putting them on the Internet and making keyword searches for stories possible. A project team, housed in the U.'s Marriott Library, developed a Web site for digitized newspapers - published from the late 1800s to the mid 1950s.
The project was started with a federal grant - administered by the Utah State Library. Recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the U. $440,000 to continue the historic newspaper project.
The U. library began using digital technology in the 1990s to increase access to fragile materials. Improvements in technology enable the U. to move from digitizing rare documents to newspapers, Herbert said.
The digitizing process starts by scanning original publications by page, headlines, news story and advertisements, then digitizing the texts and loading them onto the library server. This two-step scanning process, not only allows the full story to be readable on the computer screen, it also makes the text accessible through key-word searches, Herbert explained.
In addition to The Tribune, the U. now has 35 other Utah historic newspapers from various years available for reading over the Internet. Among them: the Emery County Progress, Salt Lake Mining Review and The Piute Chieftain.
Utah Digital Newspapers started with a small grant in 2002 for a research and demonstration project said Kenning Arlitsch, head of information technology at the U. library. The U. was among the first of six institutions - the others are the University of California, University of Florida Libraries, University of Kentucky, New York Public Library and the Library of Virginia - to receive state and federal grants to digitize their states' various newspapers.
"We are a soft-money project," said Arlitsch, meaning that the search for donations and grants is continuous. "It becomes more expensive as we move into the 1900s because [newspapers] continue to get bigger," he said.
In the beginning, only weekly newspapers were added because of the high costs involved with processing daily newspapers.
Herbert has one full time Web developer and a part-time technician working with him on the digital news project. The U. is able to get by with a small staff because much of the pre-digital work is done by two commercial organizations.
"No one has done as much as we have," Herbert said. "We're providing wide-open Web access."
sykes@sltrib.com
