On behalf of the Paulding County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, Sue LaFountain (left) presents a donation to Susan Pieper, Library Director, for the library’s newspaper digitization project.
The Paulding County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society recently donated $1,000 to the Paulding County Carnegie Library Newspaper Digitization Project. This project comprises of the digitization of Paulding County newspapers from the late 1800s through the present with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software applied. This software can identify printed characters and allows for the scanned newspaper page to be recognized as text.
“We hope to have the digitized newspaper site up by early February,” shared Susan Pieper, Library Director. “The newspapers included in this project are the Paulding Progress, Paulding Democrat, Paulding County Republican, Oakwood News, Grover Hill News, Paulding County Gazette, Payne Reflector, Antwerp Gazette, Payne Reflector and Press Review and the Antwerp Bee Argus (up to 2001).”
The library’s newspaper digitization project website will be linked to the library’s main website and will also be promoted via social media. Training will be offered for this new library resource.
“When the website is up and running, researches will type their search query in the search box which will search the entire list of holdings. However, by narrowing the search to specific newspapers and/or dates, the search results will be fewer and more relevant,” states Pieper. “The search results will be the actual newspaper page with the search term highlighted. This new database will save researchers hours of research time otherwise spent scrolling through countless rolls of microfilm.”
For more information, or to donate funds to offset the cost of this project, contact Pieper at 419-399-2032 or e-mail spieper@pauldingcountylibrary.org.
