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Pittsburgh Jewish Newspapers Project: Digitizing Archival Newspapers For Full-Text Indexing, Gabrielle Michalek, Jennie Benford

Gabrielle Michalek

The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries was asked by the library director of a local synagogue to digitize a singular collection of three historic Jewish newspapers, all of which were published in Pittsburgh. These three newspapers, the runs of which span the 19th to the 21st century, posed unique digitization challenges, both as unwieldy, fragile physical objects and as unindexed, dense analog datasets. Using a combination of revamped workflows and repurposed equipment, the Carnegie Mellon Library staff rose to the challenge, creating a full text searchable set of 160,000 digital surrogates for under $100,000. As of 2009, fundraising to secure another …