Library volunteer bit by bit digitizes archives

The Shelter Island Library will soon be a leader among county libraries in historical digital resources, thanks to the work of one extraordinarily dedicated volunteer, David Draper.

Back issues of the Shelter Island Reporter will be indexed and some scanned, and board minutes from the early years of the library’s existence will be digitally preserved for eventual availability online. The resources will be a boon to local history buffs, writers, editors and researchers, as well as those interested in Island genealogy.

The project arose, according to Mr. Draper, “out of a pretty simple idea: nothing in a community is more important than its institutional memory and any opportunity to preserve and disseminate that kind of thing appeals to me.”

His first step was the creation of an index of articles and headlines from back issues of the Shelter Island Reporter, which he started doing while still working at the paper as a proofreader and copy editor from 2007-2011. “When a paper runs a feature or story,” he said, “it needs to be able to pick its own brain.”

Without any kind of index for the paper, reporters and editors had to “painstakingly leaf through old back issues” to find relevant articles. He continued, “A perfect example is the causeway house. The collective memory said that there had been a structure there before but without an index there was no way to easily find this information.”

When he left the paper in May 2011, his index had progressed from the paper’s inception in 1959 up to 1964. Interested in continuing the project and seeing its value beyond the paper, he began using the bound issues in the reference collection of the library.

“I then discovered that all the library’s bound volumes of the early issues in the original more-or-less letter-sized format had been dismantled and were simply piles of loose pages within the original board covers.” Closer inspection revealed that some issues had been vandalized and articles cut out of them. “In order to continue the indexing project, it would be necessary to re-organize the disordered volumes and replace the damaged pages with copies from the Reporter’s own bound volumes, which I did.”

But Mr. Draper and Library Director Denise DiPaolo quickly realized that hiding in the pile of unbound papers was a golden opportunity: those loose issues of the Reporter could readily be scanned and filed permanently in an electronically accessible format.

Ms. DiPaolo arranged with the East Hampton Library for the temporary loan and installation of a digital scanner and the project began.

While they were coordinating their efforts, Mr. Draper recalled, Ms. DiPaolo pointed to a shelf of “antique-looking bound books in her office,” containing the original hand-written minutes “dating back to the 1800s” from the library’s board meetings. Mr. Draper agreed to scan those books to PDFs and, in order to make their contents even more accessible, to transcribe them to word-processing documents and convert them to easily viewable and usable files.

About back issues of the Reporter, Mr. Draper said that the indices will be “searchable, that is, with the (free) Acrobat Reader software almost universally available on PCs and Mac computers.”

As he explained, “Let’s say you want to find an obituary, wedding announcement or birth notice for your family tree project. The Reporter index files are by year from 1959 (its first year) through the mid-1960s. In a given year, the paper’s “rites of passage” are in a section of their own, by name, date of publication and page number.”

He continued, “If you’re researching an issue of general interest in the town, like the recurring question of the secession from Suffolk County of its five easternmost towns, an index of editorials, or news stories tagged “G” for general may be the place to look. Kids and the school have their own section in the index files.”

In 1968, the Reporter made the move to the larger format paper that is in use today. That has complicated the scanning project as the East Hampton BookScan does not accommodate pages so large. Not deterred, Ms. DiPaolo said, “We need to find a large BookScan machine for those issues.”

Mr. Draper didn’t want to hazard a guess as to how many hours these projects have taken so far; he said he was simply looking to the future. Since the borrowed scanner had to be returned to East Hampton, he will now be commuting there on a regular basis to continue “the indexing and scanning old Reporters and preserving the hand-written minutes.”

According to Ms. DiPaolo, the library will be working with the Reporter to determine the best way to make this resource available to the public, through the paper’s website, the library and/or the Shelter Island Historical Society.

In reading 52 years of back issues of the Reporter and some 81 years of library board meeting minutes, what has struck Mr. Draper?

“It’s been fascinating to see the evolution of the newspaper; to watch, for example, what has happened to IMA (Byrd), which is the only feature that has been consistent through the years,” he recalled. “When it first started, it was an old-fashioned gossip column.” Also interesting has been the change in the paper’s relationship to the school. “There was much more involvement with the school; kids used to have their own columns.”

With regards to the minutes, “Observing the degree of formality and the underlying social cues in the way the minutes were written has been an interesting lens through which to view changes in our culture. The somewhat florid expressions of thanks in early meetings has given way to a much more informal style; women were initially referred to by their husband’s names and then, gradually, their own.”

Ms. DiPaolo added that the minutes are also a “fascinating who’s who” of early Island families.

“I’m learning that our digitizing projects are quite unique,” said Ms. DiPaolo. “Most of my colleagues don’t have the manpower, time or the budgets to digitize things like archived minutes. We have been so lucky to have such a dedicated volunteer. It’s a fabulous resource and an amazing way to wrap-up the library’s 125th anniversary.”