Providing a broad scope of history is the mission of any academic library, according to Library Assistant V Paul Haggett, and the history of St. Lawrence is dependent on the lives of its students. In order to preserve and make this history more accessible, Haggett spent the past few months diving back into the task of digitizing every issue of The Hill News. “Unless we understand where we come from, we don’t really have a frame of reference to know where we’re going,” he states. 

The online archival project started in 2009 and, with assistance from the Northern New York Library Network (NNYLN), every issue from 1911-2008 was put on the NYS Historic Newspapers website. “Before we knew it, 10 years went by,” says Haggett, “and it was time to get these last 10 years of The Hill News online for people to access.” 

So with the help of Lauren Sharp ’22 and Jacqueline Hernandez ’23 from Special Collections, Haggett set out to scan each paper from 2009-2019. He explains that the scans were converted to pdfs by the workers at NNYLN, who then ran optical character recognition software on all the files in order to make keyword searching possible. After, all pages were put online with the previous digitized issues. 

Prior to the work of Haggett, Sharp and Hernandez, issues of the paper from 2009-2019 were only available as physical copies in ODY.  “We should have been collecting the newspaper each week and scanning each year,” Haggett states, “ideally, we’ll start doing this from now on, so it’ll take a week or so rather than several months.” 

For Lauren Sharp, this was her first major scanning project. “It’s important to be able to look back at what was happening on campus when you were there,” she states. 

Alumni especially appreciate having the opportunity to pursue past issues online. Especially now due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the digital collection is also helpful to students who might be working on a related project but unable to come into the library, according to Sharp. Currently, all issues of The Hill News from 1911-2019 can be accessed through the NYS Historic Newspapers website.