Between 1917 and 1950 the newspaper covered the African American community鈥檚 news as well as religious, educational, social, fraternal and sporting activities.
Several years ago, UofL microfilmed copies of issues that survived a 1954 fire to the building where the paper was published. Efforts to digitize the microfilm for Internet use, however, have not resulted in the fully searchable collection that Archives and Special Collections hoped that it would.
鈥淥ptical readers are unable to accurately identify faded characters or misaligned type such as exist in these microfilmed images,鈥 said University Archivist Carrie Daniels. The quality of the digital images was not good enough for the optical character recognition software to generate keywords for searching.
ASC needs people to transcribe the digitized microfilm images so they can be searched online. People who want to help can go to the project page at , read the instructions, choose an article to transcribe and start typing.
鈥淭he paper is one resource that people have wanted to access online,鈥 Daniels said. 鈥淣ow we鈥檙e finally doing it and they can help us.鈥
