Tim Schnoebelen knows how much his community loves nostalgically looking back at days gone by. He occasionally places pictures from his newspaper office on a table and lets the community go through them and select those they’d like to keep. He says it’s a huge hit.
And when the northwest Oklahoma newspaper created a Facebook page (above) and posted old pictures from the newspaper, thousands of people came to the page and not only looked at the images, but posted comments, tagged and shared them, and reconnected with each other. Tim immediately knew it was time for him to make the newspaper archives, dating back to the early 1900s, available for the community to search and enjoy.
Tim Schnoebelen, Editor of The Mooreland Leader: “Years ago I microfilmed the archives going back to 1903 but the community still couldn’t access them. That was going to take additional time and money I didn’t have. Then I heard about Discover America’s Story which makes it easy for me to generate funds needed make those files searchable and put them online. I was eager to get to it.”
Discover America’s Story is the brainchild of Paul Jeffko who also created SmallTownPapers, Inc. in 2000 – a company that provides solutions for small market newspapers, particularly those whose archives only exist in loose printed or bound volumes.
Paul Jeffko, Creator of Discover America’s Story: “I was speaking with publishers every day who were desperate to digitize their archives for two main reasons – to provide online access for their town and also to protect the documented history of the community from being lost to deterioration or things like a fire or flood. The hurdle for many was that they were struggling to survive and just didn’t have the money to move forward. So that’s where I started.”
Paul developed a sales plan for publishers that helps them secure local sponsorships to support the digital preservation of their archive. When they’re ready, the program provides them with affordable high-quality scanning and online hosting services needed to put the now-searchable archive online.
Paul Jeffko: “The Mooreland Leader project is unique in that they already had microfilm but we were able to use our technology to make the archive completely searchable and, as we complete that work, the issues are going up on the Mooreland Leader webpage (mor.stparchive.com) where they can be explored by everyone.”
The Mooreland Leader was the first newspaper in the country to sign onto the new nationwide program which will create a repository of newspaper archives exclusively from America’s small towns and communities. Within days, the newspaper had sponsors lined up and had started promoting them in ads featured in the weekly paper.
When finished, Schnoebelen says they’ll have more than 50,000 archive pages online with that number growing as current issues are added.
We hope you enjoy exploring the Discover America’s Story website.
