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Goerler to serve as University Libraries interim director

June 8, 2009

Professor Raimund E. Goerler has been appointed to serve as interim director of University Libraries, effective June 5, until the appointment of a permanent director has been made.

Joe Branin, recent director of University Libraries, decided to leave for Saudi Arabia much earlier than he had originally planned, and his last day at Ohio State was June 5.

Branin’s leadership and many accomplishments on behalf of University Libraries have been outstanding, and the university wishes him all the best in his new endeavors. A search for a new director was launched in April. Read more: http://oaa.osu.edu/DirectorUniversityLibraries040109.php

Old-school journalism gets new lease on life

May 7, 2009

New online database brings The Lantern to a desktop near you

by Julia Harris

Ohio State’s student-run newspaper has been a vocal presence on campus since 1881, making it one of the oldest university newspapers in the country.And, even as it announced May 1 that it would no longer publish a print edition on Fridays, The Lantern will continue to tell the university’s story into the future, largely thanks to the efforts of Amy McCrory.

Since the early part of 2006, McCrory — a digital imaging specialist at the Thompson Library — has spearheaded a massive effort to scan, catalog and make available full-text volumes of The Lantern from 1881 to the present.

In her windowless second-floor office at the Ackerman Library, crowded with bound volumes of The Lantern, McCrory looks a bit overwhelmed by the amount of history she shares space with. 

 “This isn’t even all of them,” she said, gesturing with a wave at the big, cumbersome books. “I think we counted something like 125 volumes, which equals roughly 120,000 pages.”

That’s not even counting the almost 40,000 pages archived on microfilm.For McCrory, the Herculean project has been an adventure. “There are a number of landmark events documented in this paper, and it’s a lot of fun to look at the old issues because it really puts you there in that time period,” she said.

“And by the end of this year, we hope to have everything online, with a search engine and a browse feature and a function for saving selections you like.”

A portion of the volumes are now available online, linking from the OSU Libraries main page. So far. McCrory says, the online database contains issues from 1881-92, 1959-72 and 1976-79, with more decades being added regularly. 

The plan is to go forward until 1997 — after which point The Lantern became accessible via the Web — and then circle back in time to the earlier volumes.

The idea for digitizing back issues of The Lantern has been floating around in various university circles for quite some time. According to Wes Boomgaarden, preservation officer at the library, researchers have long wanted a searchable index of the paper, but technology limitations made it both impractical and cost prohibitive.

 “In recent years, however, the technology for digitizing newspaper back files has developed remarkably, enabling simple searches for any word that appears anywhere in the text,” Boomgaarden said.

Another somewhat serendipitous factor helped expedite the project: The happy discovery of several bound paper volumes of the newspaper. McCrory had originally thought they would have to scan the entire bulk of the content from the microfilms stored at the university’s archives but found a treasure trove of volumes in the journalism building.

 “They had volumes from 1924 to the present, minus the whole 1930s for whatever reason. We’re also missing volumes from 1893-1924,” McCrory said. 

 “I’d love for someone to hear about this and come out of the woodwork with those missing 40 years. But for now we’ll get them from microfilm.”

Going from print (or microfilm) to the new online interface is like graduating from horse-drawn carriage to high-powered race car. Using software produced and maintained by outside vendor Olive Software, the Lantern database can be searched via a simple keyword search, browsed through an interactive calendar function or plumbed with a detailed and customizable search form.

Clicking on headlines brings up the entire story in a separate window that can be printed or e-mailed; an additional function lets users click through the entire issue in which that article appeared and browse from issue to issue.

The range and breadth of the stories — from the Vietnam War to campus rabies vaccines — make the database a valuable resource, not just for alumni.

“The newspaper has extraordinary value for social history,” said Raimund Goerler, university archivist and assistant director for Archives and Special Collection. “War, peace, politics, religion and much more appeared in its stories and illustrations.”

Putting the pieces together

March 22, 2009

Ohio State’s Athletics Department is a moneymaker.

It’s one of the few collegiate athletics programs in the country that operate in the black (although it faces a small deficit this year) and it ranked eighth overall in a Chronicle of Higher Education fundraising survey of 55 college programs in the six major conferences soliciting donations during 2007-08. Continue reading ‘Putting the pieces together’