Article: Saving the past for the future

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has an article about the digitization of a Civil War era newspaper, the Richmond Dispatch. Digitizing the Richmond Dispatch is part of a larger project to digitize newspapers from that era and give people access to the different points of view from that time.

A $478,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a federal agency, has financed the two-year effort and brought together UR [University of Richmond], the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, and Tufts University, which also has had extensive experience digitizing text materials.

In order to create searchable text, the project is "double keyboarding" the text from the scanned images (having two people re-key the text independently of each other), then are using a computer to compare the two texts in order to produce the most accurate version. The University of Richmond notes that it is time consuming, but 99% accurate.