Digitizing Bridgeport Leader Newspapers

Thanks to the Lawrence County Public Library for funding a great project—the digitizing of twenty years of the Bridgeport Leader newspaper.  The years 1974 through 1993 will be available for online reading and searching in about three months on their free website  http://lawrencepublicil.advantage-preservation.com/.

Volunteers recently delivered these bound volumes from the Research Library of the Lawrence County Historical Society to the Advantage Archives Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Society members were given a tour of the facilities and observed the process that will be used to digitize the newspapers without destroying the bindings of the bound volumes.  This picture is from the production room of Advantage Archives.

Advanced imaging equipment and years of experience will ensure that the content in the bound volumes of the Bridgeport Leader is never lost to age or deterioration.  After the volumes are photographed and digitized, they are put through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to create a searchable database that allows finding articles of interest.

The efforts to digitize these Bridgeport Leader newspapers is led by members of the podcast “Old School Red Hill”—broadcast at https://oldschoolredhill.podbean.com/ and featured at  https://www.facebook.com/groups/234255061197780/.   Hopefully, more volumes will be digitized in the future.