It’s taken a while to turn decades of Sentinel pages into digital images, easily accessible for online searches, but the state and Wrangell libraries are about halfway there.
Issues of the Wrangell Sentinel from its founding in 1902 through 1956 are now available in free online databases, where users can look through the pages. The websites allow people to search the pages by keywords, such as looking for any news stories about their family members.
The Irene Ingle Public Library has Sentinels — and its predecessors The Stikeen River Journal (1898-1899), Fort Wrangel News (1898) and Alaska Sentinel (1900s) — available online (to access: bit.ly/3rk4B2M) from the first issue Nov. 20, 1902, through 1920.
The state library, working with the Library of Congress, starts its Sentinel database (to access: https://bit.ly/3fzT3CU) in 1909 and runs through the end of 1957. It’s part of an effort to add as many Alaska newspapers as possible to the national project, said Anastasia Tarmann, of the state library in Juneau.
The Alaska State Library is seeking additional grant funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the next work phase to extend its online offerings of Wrangell history through 1963, along with other newspapers from around the state.
In addition, the Wrangell library is continuing to fundraise to expand its online database, in hopes of eventually bringing it current to 2021, and then adding to it each year.
The Wrangell Cooperative Association started the local effort in 2018 when it obtained a federal grant of $8,250 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services so that the Irene Ingle Public Library could begin turning rolls of microfilm into digital files that could be loaded online for researchers, historians, families — anyone who wants to learn more about the town’s past.
Those funds have run out, and the library continues the work as best it can with donations.
Library Director Margaret Villarma said they hear from researchers fairly frequently, inquiring about the accessibility of past issues of the newspaper online. For the years not yet online, the library still has microfilm and film readers available for use.
The Library of Congress website, called Chronicling America, provides searchable databases of tens of thousands of newspapers from communities nationwide. The digital images on the site date back as far as 1777.
Work adding the Wrangell Sentinel and other Alaska papers to the Chronicling America project has been underway since about 2017, Tarmann said.
Even before the push to put Alaska newspaper history into digital files, the state library in the 1990s embarked on the Alaska Newspaper Project to put the pages on microfilm — the technology of the day 30 years ago.
Turning those microfilm pages into digital files includes state library staff and a contractor converting the microfilm into even-sharper images that show more detail, then turning those images into pdf files that can be posted online, showing each page of each issue of the newspaper.
And while the Sentinels currently are available on two separate websites, “It’d be ideal to have it all in a single place,” Villarma said.
That will depend on funding for the two efforts, and then sharing their digital files.
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