HomeMy WebLinkAboutHPC Packet 03-16-2021HASTINGS HERITAGE PRESERVATION COMMISSION
Agenda for the March 16, 2021 Regular meeting at 7:00 p.m. conducted solely by
telephone or other electronic means as provided in Minnesota Statutes § 13D.021 and no
in-person meeting will be conducted at City Hall.
I. Call to Order and Quorum
II. Minutes:
A. February 16, 2021
III. Certificate of Approval Review
IV. Business and Information
A. Update and discussion – Newspaper Archive Digitalization
V. Adjourn
The next regularly scheduled meeting will be held on April 20, 2021
To: Heritage Preservation Commission
From: Justin Fortney, City Planner
Date: March 16, 2021
Item: Legacy Grants
HPC Action Requested:
Further discusion on newspaper archive digatlization
Background Information:
The Commission directed staff to investigate digitally archiving the Pioneer Room archives
for the purposes of making them searchable and available to the public from the internet.
It was determined that the most effective digitalization is the Hastings newspaper archives.
The Pioneer Room volunteers suggested having MNHS digitize the older newspapers where
the Pioneer Room does not own copies. That would be the Daily Gazette, which is presumed to
have begun in 1882, but we are missing almost all of the issues published before April 1888. A
handful more issues are noted as missing in the years following that.
Hastings Independent 1857-1866
Hastings Conserver 1863-1866 (already digitized and in the Newspaper Hub)
Hastings Weekly Gazette 1866-1981
Hastings Daily Gazette 1885-1917
Hastings Herald 1930-1937
Mississippi Valley Star 1969-1976
Hastings Star 1977-1980
Hastings Star Gazette 1981-2016
The cost for MNHS to digitize the archives is $1.00 per sheet. With the missing years and
issues of the Daily Gazette, there are 35,006 pages. MNHS grants are available for this
expense up to $10,000 and are available a few times throughout the year, but can be
competitive.
We do have a set of microfilm of the little Independent and Hastings Gazette, but out
Gazette is missing 1923-1951 and 1994-2003. I spoke to a commercial digitalization company that
could convert all of our 124 microfilm reels to digital OCR files for $3,000. MNHS would charge
about $62,000. I inquired with MNHS about this vast discrepancy. They informed me that The $1
per page digitization cost is a lot more than the price charged by commercial firms for scanning
microfilm to a single file format. This amount helps defray our costs for digitization to Library of
Congress National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) technical specifications (designed to
HPC Memorandum
maximize output quality and long-term accessibility), permanent hosting in the Minnesota Digital
Newspaper Hub, and permanent preservation of the digital files.
The only way of getting the archives that we don’t own digitized is by going through MNHS.
Additionally, if we want our archives guaranteed to be available and safe in perpetuity,
MNHS is likely the best avenue.