PRESERVING THE PAST – 1
Unique collaboration puts 78 years of
Psychic News at your fingertips for free JV Trust donates PN digital archive to University of Manitoba
AN ongoing project to make every newspaper format issue of Psychic News available on the internet without charge was launched in Canada on 11 May by the Editor, Roy Stemman. The first decades of searchable issues from the very first issue in 1932 are already online and it is hoped the rest of Psychic News, published through to its final appearance as a newspaper during 2010, will be available in a few months’ time for anyone to view without payment. This treasure trove of Spiritualism and parapsychology, when complete, will consist of 4,125 items – mostly complete issues of Psychic News [PN] but also special advertising supplements and booklists – and will be of great historical importance to Spiritualists around the world as well as scholars and researchers. Its pages capture triumphs and scandals, impressive stories of evidence of survival after death, interviews with wellknown mediums and celebrities, as well as offering spiritual teachings channelled through mediums. Its home page can be found at: libguides.lib.umanitoba.ca/psychicnews Visitors can then click on “Search the Psychic News Archive” and specify which issues they wish to view in their entirety, or conduct searches for mediums, healers and researchers featured in our columns, either throughout the entire collection or in specific time periods or issues.
Gift to the world How has it been possible to make such a massive chronicle of Spiritualist history freely available to every interested person who has access to the internet anywhere in the world? Ironically, it is a direct result of Psychic Press (1995) Ltd being put into liquidation in 2010 by the Spiritualists’ National Union which then owned it, because of its financial losses. For a short time, it looked as though PN would never appear again. But then a Spiritualist charity, the JV Trust, came to the rescue, purchasing the Psychic News archives and intellectual property rights. It then agreed to license the famous Psychic News title to a new company, Psychic Press Ltd, so that the newspaper’s last editor, Sue Farrow, and advertising manager, Paul Brett, could relaunch the publication as a magazine – which you are now reading. The JV Trust’s chairman at the time the
Maurice Barbanell, the founding Editor, and the very first issue of Psychic News (below)
PSYCHIC NEWS | JUNE 2018
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PRESERVING THE PAST – 1
Modern technology offers faster ways to search
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charity purchased PN from the liquidator was famous Spiritualist and former SNU president Eric Hatton. He and his fellow trustees were soon debating how the hugely important archive they now owned could be made more widely available. The problem they faced was that the archive consisted largely of bound volumes of the newspaper, starting with the very first issue published on 28 May 1932 and ending with issue No 4066 on 24 July 2010. These had proved to be extremely useful over the decades, but researchers and scholars wishing to consult them were required either to visit our offices to view the volumes and associated indexed cuttings, or to request photocopies of
specific material where they knew names or dates that made it easy to find. A research fee was involved. Modern technology in the form of digitisation, however, offers a far faster and more efficient method of searching archives. It’s an expensive solution, but with great generosity and foresight, and in a spirit of sharing, the JV Trust’s trustees – Margaret Davis (chairperson), Hugh Davis and Vanessa Larsen – decided its major asset should no longer be hidden from public gaze inside bound volumes that were already beginning to show their age. Indeed, they were likely to deteriorate in the future to the point where they would be too fragile to be digitised. Initially Susan
PRESERVING THE PAST – 1 The entire newspaper archive through to the final issue in 2010 (below) will be viewable online
Farrow, last Editor of the newspaper version of PN and first Editor of the relaunched magazine, began exploring the possibilities of preserving the archives.
International cooperation Discussions eventually led to a collaborative partnership between the JV Trust and the University of Manitoba, Canada, with major input from the Survival Research Institute of Canada, whose president, Walter Meyer zu Erpen, a professional archivist, is acting as a volunteer consultant on the project. Walter has been the “channel” through which Shelley Sweeney, head of
the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections (UMASC), and the Psychic News team in the UK – Paul Brett, Magnus Smith and Amber Wallbank– have been able to resolve niggling problems before they became major issues. The PN team has worked closely with a company employed by the JV Trust to scan every page of the archive. It proved to be a huge challenge. Some volumes had issues missing or lacked pages which had been torn from the binding. A few volumes had even totally disappeared, having been stolen or borrowed and not returned at some time during the three-quarters of a century that PN was trading as a newspaper publisher.
This was overcome when the University of London’s archive department, which houses famous psychical researcher Harry Price’s collection, generously agreed to make available its copies of Psychic News for scanning. Against all odds, the entire PN collection is now finally being digitised and transferred to Canada where experts have embedded the metadata and computer coding that is necessary to comply with international archiving standards. This coding also drives the powerful facility that will enable visitors to search for specific issues, subjects, organisations, people or phenomena throughout the archive or to narrow their searches to PSYCHIC NEWS | JUNE 2018
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Psychic News is an international publication with a global audience
The PN archives: bound volumes and multiple drawers of indexed stories were the only way to research past issues until now (Photo: Magnus Smith)
certain time periods. The first Psychic News issues to be digitised are already online and freely available. For the UMASC team responsible for ingesting the high resolution page images, under Jordan Bass, it will be a round-the-clock project through to completion well before the end of this year.
Launch of PN’s digital archive What led the JV Trust to partner with a Canadian university in order to make a British-based newspaper available online? There were several reasons. Firstly, although always published from the UK, Psychic News is an international publication with a global audience. Since the internet recognises no boundaries, having the digital version of their archive hosted in another country made perfect sense to the JV Trust. Besides, as our next story reveals (Page 21), Manitoba has many shared interests and associations with the paranormal which fully justify its role in hosting the digitised Psychic News. After all, mediumship and psychic powers know
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Hugh Davis, Vanessa Larsen and Margaret Davis (chairperson), trustees of the JV Trust, which has generously financed the digitisation project
no barriers, and research by the famous Winnipeg doctor T. Glen Hamilton and his home circle’s achievements were reported on regularly in our columns, virtually from the newspaper’s beginning. UMASC’s impressive collection of data on Glen Hamilton includes manuscripts, séance notes and over 700 unique photographs showing table levitations and the production of ectoplasm. It has encouraged others to place
their fonds [a term used by archivists to describe a collection of documents that originate from the same source] in the university’s safekeeping, and digitisation and the open access of the internet now encourages numerous visitors to explore their contents. UMASC’s YouTube channel, for example, features a video on the T. Glen Hamilton research that has so far been viewed by 324,000 visitors. n