The Alaska State Historical Records Advisory Board has recognized The Petersburg Public Library with a certificate of excellence for partnering with the Petersburg Pilot to digitize and archive the weekly newspaper going back 100 years.
The Petersburg Public Library has hundreds of old papers from decades ago. Some are still at the old library in storage and some are in the new library’s small local history room. And for a decade the library’s director, Tara Alcock, wanted to archive those papers into some kind of searchable database. The problem was that the technology just wasn’t there.
“You would literally have to type in the newspaper,” she said.
The publisher of the Petersburg Pilot, Ron Loesch, gave the library permission to digitize and share the newspaper’s weekly issues since 1974. Loesch says the paper is a historical record of what happened in the community and preserving it is important. Also, he says, the new database makes things more efficient for both the public and the Pilot.
“We get a lot of requests for archival information and we do not have the staff to search that, so being able to send people to the library archives to retrieve various articles saves us a tremendous amount of time,” Loesch said. “On a few occasions, particularly when attorneys wanted particular information, we would charge $20 an hour to search the archives, and now the archives are available through the library for free.”
As for the future of the hard copies of the old papers, the library is working on an off-site solution to storing them because as Alcock says, they are rarely used anymore.
