The Wellington County Local History Articles Digitization Project was launched on April 7 at the Wellington County Museum and Archives. The project will allow access to local Wellington County history by keyword search of Newspaper articles written by local authors including:
– Stephen Thorning’s, Valuing Our History and Timelines;
– Pat Mestern’s, Looking Back; and
– Mapleton Musings by members of the Mapleton Historical Society.
Archivist Karen Wagner said about 800 articles have been digitized and catalogued through the project, with the assistance of a number of volunteers.
Up until now, said Wagner, anyone wishing to access the history columns through the archives had to visit the facility and read them on microfilm or the actual Newspapers collected at the museum.
“The archives has been working hard to make our collections more accessible to the public and technology is allowing us to do that.”
The digital archives make it possible for people to access the material through their home computers.
The local history columns are the latest digitization project for the archives, which has already placed the Tweedsmuir history books compiled by area Women’s Institutes and a series of essays and journals from the Wellington County Historical Society online.
The history column collection includes:
– Thorning’s Valuing Our History which ran from 1990 to 1994 in the Elora Sentinel, from 1995 to 98 in the Fergus-Elora News Express and the Wellington Advertiser from 1998 to the present and Timelines which was published in the Community News from 2001 to 2008;
– Pat Mestern`s, Looking Back, which focusses on Centre Wellington and has appeared since 1990 in the News Express; and
– Mapleton Musings, written by Jean Campbell and various members of the Mapleton Historical Society, which has appeared in the Community News since 2006.
While some of the columns were supplied in digital form by the authors, Wagner said about half of them had to be scanned and converted to text format through Optical Character Recognition technology. Either way, she noted, the columns were carefully proofread to ensure the online version matches the printed articles word for word.
“It’s terrific that all this material will be online and I’m probably going to be one of the major users of it,” said Thorning, who estimates he’s generated about 1.5 million words on local history since he began writing the columns 24 years ago.
“So please go home and do some research, and read some great articles,” Wagner urged at the launch.
