The complete run of printed issues of the Emery County Progress has been digitized, preserving the county’s written history and the newspaper for generations to come. The newspaper’s first edition was published on Sept. 1, 1900 following two prior attempts to establish a newspaper in Emery County.
The newspaper ran continuously throughout the years despite various owners. The most recent purchase was made by Emery Telcom in October of 2018, bringing the ownership of the newspaper back into local hands. Emery Telcom also purchased the Sun Advocate at that time, merging three newspapers into one and distributing it for free to every resident in the two-county area.
In the eighth issue of the Emery County Progress on Oct. 20, 1900, editor H.T. Haines issued a statement on the mission of the newspaper. “We will endeavor to make The Progress a clean, reliable and newsy family paper, the main policy of which will be to publish the local current events of Emery County and assist in upbuilding our own and neighboring communities,” he shared.
Suzanne Anderson, who was instrumental in making the digitization a reality, said that the newspaper accomplished this mission. “When this digitalization project was proposed in 2016, the purpose was to preserve a record of this historic newspaper from natural disasters and erosion of time, and to make it easily accessible to consumers worldwide and free of cost to all those with internet access,” Anderson shared.
With the help of grant funding, the project began with the assistance of Tina Kirkham of J. Willard Marriott Library where the microfilm is housed. “Typically, libraries and archives across Utah store historical newspapers on microfilm,” she said. “It is the preferred media of choice. Film lasts longer than paper, so it is the best way to preserve the content of old newspapers for decades and even centuries to come. For the Emery County Progress, 1940-2004, there were nearly 70 reels of film.”
The State of Utah’s Division of Archives and Records Services assisted in the form of grant funding to make the project a reality. Once funding was secured, the work got underway. “The first part of the digitization project was to digitize the newspaper beginning September 1900 up to September 1940,” Anderson explained. “The second and final step was to digitize from 1940 to 2004, which was the year newspapers were digitally born.”
To complete the project, the Mariott Library partnered with Ancestry.com in Lehi. “Ancestry has the equipment needed to digitize microfilm on a large scale, so they were able to offer us a good price-per-page,” Kirkham said. “Each reel is run through a microfilm scanner, which takes a digital photograph of every frame (that is, every newspaper page) on the reel. This process can create 1,500 high-resolution digital images in under five minutes. Human operators at Ancestry then organize these images into the appropriate issues, named for the issue date. The digitized issues are then provided to Marriott Library, where staff ingest them into the Utah Digital Newpapers web site (UDN).”
Despite the coronavirus pandemic and natural disasters, the Marriott Library stayed on course and endeavored to complete the project. “This last and final step has been completed with the help of the amazing staff of the Marriott Library and their vendors who completed this project despite a worldwide pandemic which, according to Tina Kirkham, ‘created more than a few connectivity issues’ and an earthquake that damaged their building,” Anderson said.
In total, 5,242 issues of the Emery County Progress were digitized for public use. While it was originally estimated that these issues would include a combined 69,067 pages, the final count was 82,528. These additional 13,461 were digitized by the Marriott Library for no additional fee.
Despite the seemingly overwhelming amount of pages, the online platform is user friendly and provides a search option. “Because Optical Character Recognition is run on every page image, all of the newspapers in UDN are keyword-searchable,” Kirkham explained. “Although OCR is imperfect, it is still the best tool we have for searching for a specific name or term within a body of historical newspapers.”
Interested parties are encouraged to explore the past editions of the Emery County Progress online at www.digitalnewspapers.org. The digital archives can be accessed at no cost.
Anderson expressed appreciation to Emery Telcom and the Emery County Historical Society for supporting this project by contributing the funds for the in-kind match. “Without their help, it would not have been possible,” she said. “Also, special thanks to the citizens of Emery and Carbon counties who contributed to and supported the Historical Society’s yard sale fund raisers held over the years for this purpose.”