Daily Princetonian, Mudd Library to launch digitized archives

Larry DuPraz Daily Princetonian Digitization Project

The ‘Prince’ Board of Trustees partnered with Mudd Library to digitize the archives, which date back to the paper’s founding in 1876 and consist of roughly 85,000 pages.

“This is probably the most important project I’m going to undertake as University archivist, in terms of making information available,” said University Archivist Daniel Linke, who is heading the project.

The project is named in honor of Larry DuPraz, who served as production manager for the paper from 1946 until he retired in 1987. DuPraz acted as an informal adviser and mentor for the ‘Prince’ until he passed away in 2006.

“It’s wonderful to honor Larry because he was so important to the paper,” said Richard Thaler ’73, president of the ‘Prince’ Board of Trustees and a former business manager of the newspaper. “He was a remarkable fellow [and] influenced a lot of great writers.”

Before the digitization effort, those who wished to search the archives could spend hours searching through years of microfilm, making it difficult to use the ‘Prince’ for broad research projects.

“People would come in and say, ‘I’m working on this topic and this person came in the ’50s. Can I use the ‘Prince’ index?’ ... [But] the ‘Prince’ was not indexed in any way,” Linke said.

However, the new online database will be searchable by keyword. The database on Mudd Library’s website will include issues up to 2002 and will also be linked to dailyprincetonian.com, which includes more recent articles.

“Factual questions are buried there,” Linke said of the ‘Prince’ volumes. “I used to describe it as a Saudi Arabian oil field. It was this great untapped resource of Princeton history.”

Linke said that the digitized archives will aid “serious scholars of academic history,” and he noted that some University organizations, such as the Office of Career Services, have begun to use the archives for their own projects.

The archives are also an important resource for members of the media researching influential University alumni. A recent profile in the ‘Prince’ examined the undergraduate years of Elena Kagan ’81 through her writings as editorial chairman at the paper, and she later submitted 70 articles she wrote for the ‘Prince’ to the Senate Judiciary Committee in anticipation of her confirmation hearing.

“All these people want to read about Elena Kagan or Samuel Alito [’72] or whatever, and once it’s online, it’s going to be incredible,” Thaler said of the digitized archives.

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Though the website will be officially launched on Saturday, the digitization project is still far from complete. The project has only finished uploading volumes up to 1944 and has a projected end date of January 2011.

Part of the reason for the careful progress is the intensity of the process required to digitize the volumes. Each volume is sent to a company in Canada that photographs the pages. The pages are then sent to a Cambodian company that does the manual work of zoning, classifying each portion of the page and double-checking that the computerized copies match the pages. The pages are then loaded to the server by a New Zealand company based in Texas.

The project itself is necessitated by the state of the hardbound volumes. Many of the pages, especially from decades where economic conditions led the newspaper to use lower-quality paper, have begun to fall apart, and the glue that holds the volumes together has begun to dissolve.

“The old bound volumes were literally disintegrating,” Thaler said after the start of the digitization effort last year. “It was part of the history of the University, and it was the most detailed history of the University, and it was literally just crumbling.”

Linke said that the state of the pages also made it increasingly difficult for people to access the ‘Prince’ volumes. “It’s the reason we required people to use film,” he said. “Turning a page and having it rip is not something you want to promote.”

In addition to preserving the volumes, the project must focus its efforts on raising funds for the digitization process. Linke noted that fundraising is around 75 percent complete — he said he has raised more than $170,000 from alumni and campus sources — but the project still needs around $50,000 more.

Thaler noted in an interview on Wednesday that despite its “great progress,” the project has been more expensive than expected and still has financial obstacles to overcome.

“Everyone has thought this is the day-to-day history of the University and thought this was really important,” he said of the project’s donors. “We’ve had gifts ranging from $5 to $10,000 ... We’re really appreciative.”

Despite the challenges, both Thaler and Linke expressed their optimism that fundraising will be completed by the end of the summer.

“It’s kind of like we’re spending money every month with the scans, and the money’s sort of rolling in,” Linke said. “And we’re trying to stay ahead of that ... If all goes well, we’ll never have to touch the volumes again.”