Access to digitized Membership Newsletters

THE PROBLEM

A collection of membership newsletters of a New York City synagogue was hidden in the archive.

The Archives received funds to digitize microfilm. As a result, they received tens of thousands of digital files stored on a hard drive. The assets were high-res,but lacked descriptive names.  Additionally, individual files could not be accessed. In fact, no one could confirm that they were all digitized.

THE SOLUTION

A Digital Archivist surveyed the assets on the network and created an inventory.  He identified the technical problems that restricted access. He developed a plan, and created a workflow to solve this problem efficiently.

The archivist generated multi-page PDFs, named files descriptively, arranged them chronologically, and stored them together by year and decade. Then they converted the digital files into multi-volume PDFs and applied optical character recognition (OCR) scripts. That made the PDFs searchable.

After completing quality control, the archivist added access copies (searchable PDFs) to the server.  He created primer for the volunteer archivists, so they could search the whole corpus.  Afterwards, he suggested they schedule a time for hands-on training.  So this allowed volunteers to conduct basic and advanced searches of individual newsletters and of all newsletters.

Training

During training, the volunteer archivists practiced searching and browsing.  Then one discovered a long-lost “Thank You Letter” President Harry S. Truman wrote to the Synagogue’s Head Rabbi. The letter was in the Bulletin in 1946, and documented the President sending thanks, thoughts and wishes for the Synagogue’s Centennial Celebration.

This was a timely and rewarding surprise. The Head of Archives shared the historic news clipping with the new Head Rabbi. She also was excited because she was traveling to meet President Barack Obama at The White House the next week.