How to Digitize Old Newspapers?

[GreatGnat]

Archivist here - If your local library has a good quality scanner, it'd probably be the cheapest and most accessible way for you to digitize your newspapers! A lot of public libraries do local history projects and they may even have staff on hand who can help.

In addition to digitizing, think about how you will care for the digital files once you have created them! The content management system Omeka has a free trial that holds a limited amount of data and has no time limit, and you can pay for a subscription. if your needs are more than what the free trial can provide. Consider saving all your images as TIFFs, rather than jpegs or pngs as those formats tend to be "lossy," i.e. they will degrade over time.

Digital formats are actually more fragile than physical artifacts, and having a CMS which can perform checksums and ensure fixity will save you a lot of heartache down the road! If you plan to simply save them to a drive or your computer, be sure to draft a loss-prevention plan and regularly check your files.

I know your motivation for digitization is to no longer have to worry about the physical copies, but I would encourage you to keep them as the paper copies are more stable and will likely outlast your digital surrogates!