A couple decades’ worth of old newspapers will be coming out of Hamline’s archive storage to see the light – the scanner light, that is. The Minnesota Historical Society recently awarded Hamline’s archive department a grant to microfilm and digitize Hamline’s independent student newspaper, The Oracle. The issues that will be sent to Northern Micrographics in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, will fall between the years 1988 and 2015.

Hamline’s archivist Candy Hart applied for the grant back in January; the entire project is expected to be completed by March 1st, 2017. The Oracle issues from 1888 to 1988 have already been microfilmed and portions have been digitized. Not all have been processed due to cost and quality of the original papers.

“There are number of issues that are in really bad shape,” Hart said.

Once the digitization is complete, Hart says the archives department will be able to track how many views and searches the newspapers get.

“Hopefully we will have a couple of months that we can tell if we are getting any hits on people are actually using it,” Hart said.

“We will be able to tell how many people are looking at [copies of The Oracle] and basically where they are so we can tell if they are students on campus or people across the world,” Hart said.

The finished product will have both digital and microfilmed copies. The microfilmed copies Hart says will be stored somewhere else on campus.

Advisor to The Oracle and English professor David Hudson feels it’s necessary to preserve the newspaper’s history.

“Ironically, the digital age has not made this historical record more secure. We have changed storage media and methods frequently over the past few years and often lost electronic files. The paper edition is often the only surviving record of The Oracle, and we need to preserve it in a durable and accessible form”.

The library staff is currently working on creating a metadata of the already digitized copies of The Oracle to be processed through Hamline’s search engine, Clicknet.