Digital archive of Orange and White, Daily Beacon expected next academic year

DANIEL DASSOW Editor-in-Chief

story about administration.

Next academic year, for the first time, these memories will be accessible with the click of a few keys once UT Libraries completes a full digital archive of The Daily Beacon and its predecessor, The Orange and White.

The expansive digitization project represents years of work on the part of university archivists and library administrators, who hope that the archive will make research into the university’s history more accessible and enjoyable.

Alumni, faculty, staff and researchers frequently request to see old copies of the Beacon, which are often the only source of information on everyday campus history since 1965. Currently, those copies are sitting in fragile bound volumes in the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives in Hodges Library.

Holly Mercer, senior associate dean of UT Libraries, explained why the university prioritized the pricey creation of the archive.

student newspapers, we are making it easier to locate and read the stories of interest to the Volunteer community.”

The creation of the archive also presents a chance to preserve decades-old physical newsprint struggling to stand the test of time.

Alesha Shumar, assistant head and university archivist with University Archives, said that groups who came through special collections in Hodges took a toll on the papers.

“The problem with these is that they are so fragile,” Shumar said, paging through a 1982 edition of the Beacon. “We had classes coming in here and using them, and then you would see just newspaper confetti on the floor.”

Shumar has worked to digitize yearbooks, commencement programs and sports programs, but the effort to digitize The Orange and White and the Beacon is larger and more expensive than the other projects.

Digital, a firm in Maryland, to make scans of each edition of the student papers. Josh Morgan, digital production technical manager for UT Libraries, said his team has sent both bound copies and microfilm of the papers to the firm.

The library receives thousands of images from the firm, which are then sorted through one-by-one by Morgan and his team of students to select the best scans. Currently, the team has gone through 80,000 images, with thousands more on the way.

The most difficult part of the process comes when the scans are “ingested” into a repository which sorts the finished archive by metadata that makes the pages searchable by word. Morgan predicts the archive will be finished either in late fall or early spring.

Ask most UT alumni for a story from their college years involving The Daily Beacon, and they’ll have one. Maybe it was the lines of students reading the paper each morning over breakfast or a race to finish the crossword puzzle before class. Maybe it was the craziest entries from the crime log or a buzzy

“Newspapers are invaluable sources when conducting historical research,” Mercer said. “Answers to many questions fielded by UT archivists can be found in The Daily Beacon, but requesting the correct issues, visiting Special Collections and poring over fragile newspapers can be daunting. By digitizing the