« Users can expect privacy from 'Net providers | Main | Dispute spurs early end to Holocaust exhibit »
April 23, 2008
Decades of city history digitized
New Brunswick's past now easier to search
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
BY NAWAL QAROONI
Star-Ledger Staff
Before this week, if you were searching for an obituary from New Brunswick from some unknown date in the late 1800s, you would have to scroll through dozens, if not hundreds, of reels of microfilm at Rutgers University.
Now, however, two decades of the New Brunswick Daily Times, a newspaper that was recording history more than a century ago, has been digitized at the city's Free Public Library.
Hsienmin Chen, the librarian who secured a grant from the county for the effort, said the new technology will make it much easier for researchers or anyone simply interested in the city's past.
The library borrowed the microfilm from Rutgers University and sent it to Innovative Document Imagining in East Brunswick to digitize.
The $2,200 grant from the Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Foundation was matched in part by the library for digitizing 20 reels of film, she said. Archives from 1871 to 1892 have been processed, and the goal is to earn additional grants to digitize all 45 years of the newspaper, which ceased publishing in 1916.
"The newspaper isn't indexed, so a lot of times we depended on people to provide the date," Chen said. "Otherwise we have to search page by page on microfilm, and sometimes that is challenging or impossible.
"Now people can just come in and use the public computers to search the PDFs or call and ask us to do it." PDFs are computer files that recreate the original appearance of a document.
Library director Bob Belvin said the switch also makes it easier to highlight the city's rich history.
"People document the lives of important people, but when you go back in the newspaper, it includes stories about people who weren't famous either," Belvin said. "Those are the people who turn out to be interesting."
Many families in transition lived in New Brunswick at the turn of the century, he added.
"There were a lot of families who lived here for a while before moving on," Belvin said. "So this will also be helpful to people interested in researching their family history, too."
Nawal Qarooni may be reached at nqarooni@starledger
Posted by tumulty at April 23, 2008 1:10 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)