Louisiana newspaper pages from as early as 1860 will appear in a place their original journalists never knew would exist — the Internet.LSU Libraries is teaming with the Library of Congress on a project called Chronicling America. With funding from a two-year National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the University’s Hill Memorial Library will add Louisiana to the list of 22 states working to digitize historic newspaper pages, which will be viewable on the Library of Congress Web site.Newspapers spanning 1860 to 1923 will be digitized, said Elaine Smyth, head of special collections for LSU Libraries. Smyth said the period ends in 1923 because of copyright laws, and the time interval published will move forward each year as copyrights expire.The time period also has historical significance, said Gina Costello, co-director of the project.”This time in Louisiana history was very challenging and brought many economic and social changes,” Costello said in an e-mail to The Daily Reveille. “After Reconstruction and the decline of cash crops, the lumbering industry flourished in Louisiana in the 1880s. Oil and natural gas were discovered at the turn of the century, which brought new revenue and jobs to the state.”Smyth said the first step in the process is determining the newspaper titles to be digitized, which will be decided by an advisory board.”[On the board] are K-12 teachers, history professors from around the country and archivists and librarians from around the state,” Smyth said. “We want to pick titles that have lots of historical reporting and are rich in content.”Once the titles have been determined, the complicated digitization process begins.”Reels of microfilmed newspapers are digitized using a roll film scanner,” Costello said. “The scanner is capable of scanning entire reels of film in a few minutes, and the images are then edited using special software.”The grant provides funds for the library to hire an outside vendor to complete the digitalization because of the complexities of the process. Smyth said the library is preparing to take bids and select a vendor.One reason the process is so painstaking is because of the analysis required on the newspaper text, Smyth said.”We have to do optical character recognition so people can keyword search for content,” Smyth said. “It won’t be completely accurate because the old typefaces aren’t exactly like modern typefaces. But as of now, there are no indexes, so this will be a big improvement.”Smyth said the pages should be on the Library of Congress Web site in nine months to one year. If the project is successful, LSU Libraries can then apply for a two-year extension on the grant to expand the time frame of digitized newspapers.”It is a really complex process to get these things up, and we are at the very beginning,” Smyth said. 
—-Contact Ryan Buxton at [email protected]