Historic newspaper archive now online

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on January 30, 2025.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

The Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village and the University of Lethbridge Digitization Team have partnered, to make more than 120 years of Pincher Creek history available in an accessible digitized collection of the Pincher Creek Echo newspaper.
This collection spans from Apr. 15, 1900, to December 31, 2023, and is accessible in the Library’s Digitized Collections platform.
Gord Tolton, education co-ordinator and collections manager for Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village, told reporters Wednesday during the launch, that the project is not only intended to preserve the history of southern Alberta, but also to be able to answer to the multiple inquiries they constantly receive from all over the world.
“KBPV has archivally preserved every edition of the Echo since its inception and provides supervised access to those doing family, genealogical or student research, and this has provided assistance to published authors in providing backgrounds to their works, said Tolton.
But Tolton explained the papers weren’t meant to last this long, and the originals became extremely fragile and restrictions to these papers were needed.
“This is where the Echo Digitisation project comes in,” he said. “To provide alternative access to the data of the newspapers themselves and eliminate any need for tactile access. With this, we can also offer access to the Echo virtually to anyone who wishes to read it, regardless of location.”
The process began thanks to funding received from the Community Foundation of Lethbridge and Southwestern Alberta, that helped them access microfilm versions of older publications to be digitized. This took place in January 2023, when owner Postmedia eliminated its print edition and converted to digital.
“The Alberta government in the 1970s undertook a program of photographing and putting them on to microfilm, which was the best technology of the time, and every library had access to these reels,” says Tolton.
An author and researcher himself, he almost went blind in the 1990s using microfilm versions of newspapers for his research.
“Through the donation of the Pincher Creek Library, we had those reels in our archives. And thanks to Backstage and of course, the foundation’s backing, those reels were taken into their facility in Bethlehem, PA.,” said Tolton. “And through a process I don’t even understand, those microfilms were digitized and made into the searchable format that we are unleashing today.”
 Jake Cameron, system support specialist of Library Information Systems at the University of Lethbridge, explained that the reels were all sent to Backstage Library Works in Bethlehem, PA., because they have a printer scanner that is able to scan each individual page.
“They scan those pages, then they create spreadsheets of metadata that align with those pages,” said Cameron. “Then they went through and correct the imaging on all those pages so that they’re clearer, very neat and as legible as possible.”
After that, they’re in a process called optical character recognition (OCR) which goes through and reads each individual page and creates a text for those pages, to make the text searchable in the online version.
“So, all I literally have to do is work with my team to get a banner made for each collection, that banner identifies the name of the collection and then I literally have to flip a switch, put in some information about the collection and then it’s live to the world,” said Cameron.
Tolton explained that this process took care of a massive number of editions, but only up to 1980, as that is how far they were on microfilm, and because of this they have to do the rest by hand in-house.
“It started in the summer of 2023 with an inventory of what papers we had and where, and in what repository they can be found. then over the past 2 summers carried on with in-house scanning,” said Tolton.
He said they are not done yet, but it will be an ongoing process. And because due to copyright they can only publish 50 years into the past, they will continue to manually scan the newspapers to have the ready as the years continue to pass when they are able to be added.

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