A project to digitally archive almost 20 years of the early copies of The Cobar Weekly has gotten underway.
Over its almost 35 years of history, The Cobar Weekly staff has diligently kept a copy of every edition printed since the paper’s inception in February 1986.
Staff however were concerned that a good portion of the collection (from 1986 to 2005) are only paper copies which are beginning to show signs of deterioration.
Managing editor Sharon Harland said staff are careful to use extra care when handling the very early editions.
“We’ve talked for a while about making digital copies of the paper which will ensure they will always be preserved,” Mrs Harland said.
“It will also help us to quickly access information from old editions along with any readers who want to access our archives.”
The archiving job however is a big one as each individual page needs to be manually scanned and then filed.
“We never seem to have a spare staff member with any spare time to do this so we decided to see if we could get some funding to employ an extra hand to make it happen.
“We were lucky to get some funding last year from the Cobar Bowling & Golf ClubGRANTS program to get started,” Mrs Harland said.
Uni student Abby Carswell, home on holidays, was recruited to help out and started the archive project at the end of November.
Each edition, depending upon its size (which varies from 16 to 40 pages), takes about 10-15 minutes to scan and save into a digital file.
So far Abby has scanned and archived five folders covering 212 editions, and will continue to work her way through up to the end of 2005.
With 48 editions from each year, this has, and will continue to keep Abby fairly busy right throughout her holidays.
