Missouri Historical Newspapers Project

Missouri newspapers are one of the most significant historical sources concerning the lives of Missourians, their culture and history.

The purpose of this project was to scan at least ten years of at least five historic Missouri newspapers and provide indexing for those issues. In an earlier project funded by a Library Services and Technology Act grant from the Missouri State Library, one year of several newspapers were scanned and index terms were assigned to significant articles in each of the newspapers. This proved to be very time and labor intensive. In this project, funded by an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant through the Missouri State Library, we originally intended to base the indexing on the headline and full text of the first paragraph of the article. This information was to have been entered by student workers.

About five months into the project, we discovered that Olive Software was marketing a product (Active Newspaper Archive) that would take scanned images from either hardcopy or microfilm, provide full text indexing, and automatically segment the newspaper issue into articles and advertisements. We purchased this software and contracted with Olive Software to process the images scanned in-house from hardcopy, those scanned from microfilm by OCLC, and from microfilm that we sent them.

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was not 100% accurate as it depended greatly on the condition of the image to be OCR'ed. However, it has provided full text searching capability at a fraction of the time and effort that manual indexing would have required. The software has tools that allow us to correct the OCR'ed text and re-index it when we feel that is necessary.

We hope that the results of this project will prove useful to students, researchers and the general public. Hopefully, we will be able to add to this collection in the future.

Please address any questions or comments to Kurt Kopp - koppk@umsystem.edu.

The participants in this project were:

• The Central Methodist College Library
• The Kansas City Public Library
• The Lincoln University Library
• The Office of Library Systems of the University of Missouri
• The State Historical Society of Missouri
• The University of Missouri-Columbia Library
• The University of Missouri School of Journalism

Original newspapers and microfilm were also contributed by:

• The Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis Library
• The St. Louis Public Library
• The William Jewell College Library