Over 50 years and 1,000 issues of The Clarion digitally archived

After two years in the making, over 1,000 issues of the Citrus College Clarion are now available in a digital archive online. The collection spans from 1964 to 2018 and is easily searchable on the web.

“It actually started on Twitter,” Librarian Sarah Bosler of the Hayden Memorial Library said. Patrick Schmiedt, adviser for the Clarion, tweeted about a similar project at a university in June 2018.

They began researching options for digitizing the Clarion’s archive shortly after, which then lived in VA 236, the newsroom.

Bosler said archiving the collection is much more complicated than putting paper on a scanner.

“Taking inventory and finding out how many copies we had took about a year, it was a much longer process than we thought,” Bosler said. 

It required the help of multiple librarians. Part-time librarian Sandy Krause, who has a Master’s degree in Library Science, oversaw the details of the project.

Bosler and Krause sorted through the archive, where some pages were missing or damaged.

“We had to go paper by paper and look at them for completeness and find the best copies,” Krause said. She said that Patrick had around 15 “moving-sized boxes” of student newspapers.

Before February 1965, the Clarion was called the Collegian Owl. Bosler said it’s interesting to see how the paper’s masthead has evolved over time.

“There are student newspapers going back to the beginning of the college that I couldn’t track down,” Krause said, which is why the collection goes back to 1964.

When all 9,461 pages were accounted for, they were ready to be digitized.

“The first step is getting the funding and choosing the vendors we want to work with,” Bosler said.

Funding for the project came from a College of Completion Innovation Grant from the Citrus College Foundation. Schmiedt and Bosler applied for the grant and were awarded $2,500 in June 2018.

“We spoke with some different companies and some different people and decided to work with a company called Backstage Library Works,” Bosler said.

Backstage Library Works provided the professional scanning for the Clarion issues. The pages went through the process of optical character recognition, which makes the text searchable, Krause said.

The scanned copies are hosted by U.C. Riverside’s California Digital Newspaper Collection. In its database, over 1.5 million pages of newspapers from across California are searchable and free to read online.

Bosler said that every now and then, “people in the community will ask us for information on something,” and when they do, “we’re always having to open up the newspapers sometimes and just flip page to page.”

Now, with a digital archive, over 50 years of Clarion issues are conveniently searchable on the web and available 24/7, Bosler said.

Krause said she hopes the collection continues to grow.

“Some of the new born-digital issues will be going up there probably at the end of each semester; we’re still working out the details on that,” Krause said.

On the CDNC’s website users can search for issues by calendar date as well as within issues using words or short phrases. Users can download PDF versions of issues after creating a free account on CDNC’s website.

“We’re having our library staff look through the collection for interesting articles to share on our social media page,” Bosler said. “Hopefully we’ll have some good throwback Thursday posts coming up pretty soon.”