Saskatchewan Archives digitizing 560,000 newspaper pages from Second World War years. Arthur White-Crummey. Regina Leader-Post. August 28, 2019.
This is an article about the digital preservation laboratory of the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan and the project of scanning and auditing a collection of weekly newspapers from 160 Saskatchewan communities. The Archives is marking the 80th anniversary of Canada’s entry into the Second World War by digitizing its trove of community newspapers covering the years 1939 to 1945. There are 560,000 pages for that period alone, just part of a massive collection of 10 million pages extending from 1878 to the 1960s.
The archivist views digitization "as a way of ensuring the survival of those priceless records. The newspapers themselves have largely disappeared". But digitization is about more than preservation, it’s a way of “democratizing the record.” People no longer have to travel to local areas to view the resources. “They can now go online anywhere in the world. That’s what it’s all about.”
