Three co-op students, a handful of volunteers, 10,000 pages spanning 64 years, and about 500 hours of labour later and the Grimsby Public Library has a reason to celebrate.
We’re delighted to see VITA member Grimsby Public Library receive some much-deserved attention for their digitization of the Grimsby Independent. You can see the completed project on their VITA site, along with index records of other papers.
There’s also a party today! From 4:30pm to 5:30pm at the Grimsby Public Library, there will be both cake and history!
“Newspapers are the best source for day-to-day local history,” said library deputy chief librarian Ryan Waldron, adding, “it just gives you the flavour of what was happening at the time.”
The library has been working to digitize the surviving copies of the Independent — in partnership with the Grimsby Museum and Grimsby Historical Society — between 1885 and 1949 since the winter of 2018, recently wrapping up the herculean effort of historical preservation.
Waldron explained with physical copies and microfilm backups deteriorating, the library realized a backup of sorts was needed to preserve the papers as critical primary sources of local history.