College Newspapers: Columbia Spectator Archive Now Available Online

From Columbia University Libraries:

Columbia University Libraries and the Columbia Spectator announce the public release of the Columbia Spectator Archive website. This site represents the first phase of a multiyear project to digitize the full run of the Columbia Spectator, Columbia’s student newspaper and the second-oldest college daily in the United States. In its current phase, the Spectator Archive includes nearly 4,000 issues published from 1955 through 1992, totaling more than 30,000 pages. When completed, it will include issues from the paper’s beginnings in 1877 through the present.
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Whenever possible, Spectator issues were scanned from the original paper versions, and high-quality, color digital reproductions were generated. State-of-the-art optical character recognition, automatic text parsing software, and a powerful search and display system, provided by Digital Data Divide and Digital Library Consulting, respectively, allow for article-level access as well as full text searching of the entire Archive. The project, which is being jointly funded by the Libraries and the Spectator, has been challenging as many of the original volumes required paper repair and conservation due to their fragile condition from years of use.
The Archive is the result of a unique partnership between the Columbia Spectator and the University Archives, a unit of Columbia University Libraries. Within the Libraries, the project was carried out by the Preservation and Digital Conversion Division and the Libraries Digital Program Division. The project also benefits from shared technology resources provided by Cornell University Libraries under the auspices of the Columbia/Cornell 2CUL partnership.

Direct to Columbia Spectator Archive

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Interactive Tools, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Preservation