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By Tim St Clair
Searching for information in past issues of
newspapers is like looking for a potato chip in a landfill.
Most newspapers keep copies of previous editions in large bound volumes
arranged in chronological order. Libraries frequently have microfilm copies
of past editions too. However, the only way to find a particular article is
to look at every page of the old papers or know the date something was
published.
Paul Jeffko of West Seattle is helping to revolutionize newspaper archives
with a computerized way to search for specific data in decades-old newspaper
articles. advertisements and even photographs.
TECHNOLOGY REVIVES NEWSPAPER HISTORY — Paul Jeffko of West Seattle is
helping to revolutionize newspaper archives with a computerized way to
search for specific data in decades-old newspaper articles, advertisements
and even photographs. Here he holds up old pages from the West Seattle
Herald that is not stored as a searchable database online. He is in front of
the mural on 44 Avenue Southwest. Photo by Tim Robinson.
Using "optical character recognition" technology, his West
Seattle-based company scans every page of a newspaper's past editions. The
software can search through news articles, advertisements and even
photographs for people's names or other particular subjects.
Just as importantly, it's all available on the internet and free to users,
Newspapers pay to have their archives scanned into the system but it's free
to use.
Neither the Seattle Times nor the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have that
capability. The P-I's electronic files go back to 1986 and the Times' date
only to 1990. The dailies have clipping files arranged by subject but no
scanned versions of prior papers.
Jeffko's business, called SmallTownPapers,
began six years ago. Some of the scanning is done in Maryland but the
company is run from a converted house on California Avenue.
Back issues of 65 different small newspapers have been scanned and are
available on the SmallTownPapers website. Among the archives are newspapers
such as Southeast Alaska's Island News from Prince of Wales Island, Alaska;
The Buffalo Ridge Gazette in Ruthton, Minn.; The Dispatch from Maunaloa-Molokai,
Hawaii, and The Durham Skywriter in Durham, N.C.
Some past editions of the West Seattle Herald — years 1937, 1952 and 1969
— are available online through SmallTownPapers too.
The oldest paper electronically copied by SmallTownPapers is the Woodville
(Miss.) Republican, which dates back to 1824.
"We've got 150 years of content that has never been accessible
before," Jeffko said. "We're enabling people to discover their
community' s history." As far as Jeffko knows, his company is the only one providing
searchable access to the archives of small newspapers.
The service is used by historians, genealogists and other researchers. Many
inquiries are personal.
"People write to me and say, 'My dad was falsely accused (of a crime)
in a small town in Texas," Jeffko said.
Not every user is interested in the past. Many use SmallTownPapers to search
the latest editions of papers, most of which are online by Friday of any
given week.
Jeffko developed his affinity for small towns while growing up in West
Seattle, although with a 2000 population of nearly 79,000, West Seattle
would be considered a small city elsewhere.
He grew up on 21st Avenue Southwest in the Puget Ridge neighborhood and went
to Sanislo Elementary School and Boren Jr. High. By the time he was old
enough for high school, his family moved to Long Beach, Calif. That's where
he got into the printing business.
"I walked past a print shop on my way to school," Jeffko said. It
was a commercial printer that caught his attention each time he went by.
"The owner asked if I wanted a job," Jeffko said. "He said,
'I see you looking in the window every day.'"
Jeffko was 14 when he started sweeping out the print shop. That's the way a
young person got into the printing business back then, he said. No one went
to school to become a printer. You got a job
in a print shop and learned the trade there, he said.
He got interested in typesetting, but that was shortly before computers
fundamentally changed the printing business. Desktop publishing, with its
multitude of fonts and type sizes, made the typesetter's job nearly
obsolete.
Jeffko changed with the new technology and, after six years in California,
he moved back to Seattle at age 20 and got a job as production manager of
Western Type & Printing, which did typesetting work for the Seattle
Times.
Later
in his career, Jeffko spent time helping small newspapers make the leap from
typewriters to computers. In 1993, he spent two months working with the Quad
City Herald, .a small weekly newspaper in Brewster, Wash.
"I got immersed in the charm of putting a paper out," he said.
Jeffko also saw how difficult it was to find
articles published years ago in the Quad City Herald, which was founded in
1901. Each edition of the newspaper was quarter-folded and added to a bundle
representing every year of publication. All of the archived bundles were
then stored in the attic.
"I thought to myself, there must be a better way to do this,"
Jeffko said.
By the late 1990s Jeffko was a print broker, who orchestrated printing jobs
on behalf of clients by recruiting artists and arranging for printers. One
of his clients wanted to start producing “e-books,” that is, electronic
copies of books available by computer. Jeffko said
they had to disassemble the books to scan the pages.
He didn't like destroying books to create
electronic copies. So he started using optical character recognition
technology and was soon thinking about the archives of the Quad City Herald.
The Brewster weekly was the first to have its archives completely digitized
in SmallTownPapers.
Jeffko's next goal is to sell the value of his
growing data base to one of the Internet's search engines
Tim St. Clair can be contacted at
tstclair@robinsonnews.com
or 932-0300.
Copyright
Robinson Newspapers (West Seattle Herald) 2005. Used with permission.
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