The Brown & White

As The Brown and White approaches its 114th year of printing two issues a week since 1894, Special Collections Librarian, Ilhan Citak, and members of the online computer library center had been searching for a way to preserve the newspaper and on Tuesday they revealed their plan to go digital.

Citak and Christine Guenther, the project manager at the OCLC's preservation resources, presented "The Global Economy of the Digital Brown & White," which gave an overview of the technological process of digitizing The Brown and White newspaper archives.

"We're planning to be able to load, browse, search, save and print the 5,500 issues The Brown & White has produced since 1894," Citak said. "This ensures the longevity of the newspaper's archives."

Once the process is complete, anyone will be able to go online, browse through PDFs of all the old newspapers, or plug in a phrase, name or date and find all news articles pertaining to that keyword.

Along with Citak and Guenther, other Lehigh librarians and members of the OCLC have worked to find the best way to go about this project.

There are three main steps to this extensive process, according to Guenther. The first is scanning each original archive to get the best picture quality. The group uses two scanners to transport the images.

"We have to choose between films and microfilms based on the type and quality of each issue," Guenther said. "Microfilms were not the best tactic for some archives because of their fragility. Those that couldn't use microfilm were delivered to the OCLC and digitized."

Second in the process was content conversion.

By using digitization, articles are defined and linked using specific words and phrases. Titles are corrected and pictures are linked to searchable content.

Finally, the presentation must be configured so people can search and browse articles, enlarge certain articles, save and print.

The archives will be illustrated in a gray scale, Citak said.

Scanning in gray scale will make the issues much clearer for readers than if they were scanned on the average black and white scale.

The process of digitizing archives is complex, and involves the collaboration of many people from different backgrounds.

"The spin I'm putting on this is the global economy," Guenther said. "I want to show how this process and bundles of archives have traveled across the world and the many involvements this project has with other sources."

For the whole process to take place, many nations and people are involved, Guenther said. The archives have traveled from Bethlehem to Seattle, Germany, Romania, Russia and India.

The reasons for the transport of the archives varies.

The content conversion, for example, is programmed in Germany with programs called Analyzed Layout & Text Object and Optical Character Recognition, which are automatic systems to categorize each word in an article or image.

The Brown and White faculty advisers, Wally Trimble and Jack Lule, are consultants to Citak and Guenther during this process and are advocates of digitizing these archives.

"I'm flabbergasted at how cool this process is," Trimble said. "Digitizing every archive of The Brown and White is such a valuable tool, not just for Lehigh, but for the community, scholars and alumni that want to know more about Lehigh. If you want to know what happened in the spring of '89, you can look it up now."

The Brown and White will also have to think about how to use this program as a feature on its Web site, according to Trimble.

For example, a news article from 50 years ago on each specific date could be linked to The Brown and White's Web site.

Trimble said digitizing the papers is an important step in ensuring that no archives are lost and the history of the university, as told by the student newspaper, is preserved.