Digital archive of old Ontario newspapers a hit with readers as far away as New Zealand
Most of the papers now online date from the 1860s to the 1920s
Officials with Stratford-Perth Archives say their new historical newspaper database has proved popular with the public, recording more than 53,000 visits in the nearly three months it's been online.
The archive launched in mid-September, allowing amateur and professional historians, and curious residents a way to look at old local newspapers dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The project kicked off in 2022, spearheaded by Jennifer Georgiou, an assistant archivist at the archives. For the last three years, she and two summer students have been working to scan the archives' microfilm and physical newspaper collection at a rate of about 12,000 to 28,000 pages each summer.
"I find now that a lot of researchers want a Google-esque database when looking for research," Georgiou said this week. "The numbers show that this has been a really great tool for researchers."
Users from as far away as New Zealand and Norway have looked at the database, said Betty Jo Belton, manager of archives services at Stratford-Perth Archives.
"We have heard from people who found information about family members just by searching the surname across a number of papers."
The scanned newspapers have been uploaded to a website operated by the non-profit OurDigitalWorld, which hosts digital artifacts for various Ontario libraries and archives.
A built-in tool made it easy to convert the images into machine-readable text so users could search keywords. One challenge was getting crisp images to make it work, Belton said.
"When you're working with heritage newspapers ... they're kind of showing the fact that they're over 100-years-old, in some cases," she said.
Eighteen newspapers have been scanned, and editions from 12 are available online, all pre-1950. Due to copyright limitations, post-1949 issues are only available using archive reading room computers.
There was a deliberate effort to pick newspapers from across Perth County, including Atwood, Listowel, Milverton, Monkton and Stratford, Belton said. Most papers online date from the 1860s to the 1920s.
The oldest edition available online is the County of Perth Herald from July 1, 1863. The paper was a precursor to the Stratford Beacon Herald, which is still published — one of a handful in the archive that still are.
The most recent edition is from the Stratford Mirror, dated Dec. 27, 1946.
"The project is not done," Belton said. "More of the local papers will be added as more summers go by and more work gets done."
Georgiou said there wasn't a specific urgent need to digitize the microfilm, unlike the film deterioration that prompted London Public Library to consider a similar digitization effort.
However, Belton noted older physical papers in the archive's collection are more fragile, and some had never been microfilmed, including the Stratford Mirror and the Mitchell Times.
"We were concerned that over time we would actually lose the opportunity to reformat those papers at all," she said.
Roughly 15 years of the original Stratford Times is available from January 1876 to March 1891, a period when Stratford had at least eight weekly papers.
The Times was taken over by the Perth Herald, which merged with the Stratford Beacon in the 1920s to form The Stratford Beacon Herald. The Stratford Times was relaunched in 1964, but ended news coverage 10 years later, according to the book Floodtides of Fortune.
A third Stratford Times was formed in 2021 by Stewart Grant, president of Grant Haven Media and publisher of the St. Marys Independent and several other community newspapers. Initially a monthly paper, it now prints biweekly.
LISTEN | Stratford Times publisher Stewart Grant on the local news business
"It's great that they've included so many local publications from the past and from today," Grant said. "To see this online resource where you can type in a keyword and instantly find what you're looking for, that's such a huge time saver."
His Stratford Times is also in the database and can be viewed at the archives. Grant launched the paper to fill a void left by the 2017 newspaper swap of Postmedia and Torstar that saw Stratford City Gazette and St. Marys Journal-Argus close with 34 other Ontario newspapers.
That in mind, Grant said copies are always dropped off at the archives for long-term preservation.
"When we publish a paper, we do so for two audiences. We do it for the people of today ... but we also think about people, maybe 100 years from now, who want to learn what life was like in 2024 in this area."
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