Newspaper Digitization at Boston Public Library

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Image of the front page of The Woman's Era newspaper, which includes a story on and photograph of abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone.
The Woman’s Era, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 24, 1894

It will come as no surprise that there is widespread, urgent demand from institutions across the state to digitize historical newspapers, especially local titles that provide invaluable local coverage of daily history and titles with underrepresented perspectives and histories. There is an incredible amount of important material in need of access and preservation, and making these resources available will require a robust, sustained effort.

The Digital Services team at BPL has been working on increasing capacity for newspaper digitization and dissemination; here’s an overview of recent efforts from the last year:

Digitization at BPL

The BPL obtained a Mekel Mach 5 high-capacity microfilm scanner in March 2021, but the pandemic resulted in a significant delay with scheduling the necessary setup and training needed for operation. Mekel’s imaging technicians were finally able to help get this machine up and running in the fall of 2021, which has since been used to digitize several short runs of historically significant newspapers, including The Woman’s Era and The Tocsin of Liberty. The main current project, which is still ongoing, is scanning a major run of the Lawrence Evening Tribune (1890-1929).

While the scanning work is proceeding well (over 96,000 pages to date), imaging is only the start of any newspaper digitization project – there is significant manual work needed to collate and group the scanned pages into issue-level folders, and to identify missing pages, duplicate pages, and other anomalies.

There are also technical steps involved in processing the scanned images to create derivative files (such as using optical character recognition to extract text and word-coordinate information to support full-text searching and highlighting keyword matches on the page image), as well as developing the pipelines, workflows, and scripts to ingest the content into the digital repository. The library hopes to make significant progress on these latter steps during the second half of 2022.

Screenshot of a search box field in the Digital Commonwealth repository, with the heading "Search inside: The Tocsin of liberty"
“Search inside” view
Screenshot of the word "emancipated" highlighted in the text of a newspaper article.
Keyword searching

National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) Grant

Through the assistance of the Boston Public Library Fund (https://bplfund.org/), BPL was awarded a grant in September 2021 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to join the National Digital Newspaper Program (https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/), a long-running effort coordinated by the Library of Congress to build and maintain a free online digital library of historical newspapers from all U.S. states and territories. During the last few months, Digital Services staff has been working with an advisory committee of scholars and experts to identify significant newspapers from the library’s microfilm archives for inclusion in this national collection, which will then be digitized and made available via Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), which provides access to over 18 million pages from over 6,000 newspaper titles published from 1777 to 1963, and in Digital Commonwealth. The project, which will run until October 2023 and produce 100,000 pages of scanned newspaper content, is currently nearing the end of the title selection process, with imaging scheduled to contracted out to a digitization vendor in the fall of this year.

MyHeritage & Boston Neighborhood Newspapers

In 2016 BPL established a partnership with MyHeritage to provide access to BPL-held microfilm for digitization and display on their online genealogy platform, with the condition that BPL will receive a copy of all digitized page images produced. To date, this partnership has resulted in the digitization of approximately 7.5 million pages from a wide variety of Massachusetts newspapers spanning the late 1700s to the mid 1900s. However, the deliverables include the image scans only, and not any of the derivative files required to support discovery and display in Digital Commonwealth (see the “Digitization at BPL” section above). Producing the necessary derivative files at this scale will require additional capacity and funding support.

To evaluate the logistics, costs, time, and effort needed to ingest the MyHeritage-digitized materials into Digital Commonwealth, BPL is currently undertaking a pilot project using a vendor specializing in newspaper digitization to process a subset of these titles, highlighting Boston’s neighborhood newspapers. The titles selected for this project span from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, representing many newspapers that currently have limited online availability, including the Roxbury Gazette, Hyde Park Times, East Boston Free Press, South Boston Gazette, Charlestown News, and the Dorchester Beacon, to name just a few. This project will produce approximately 170,000 pages of content; processing is scheduled to be completed by the end of June, and the goal is to integrate this content into the repository ingest workflow in the latter half of the year.

Looking Forward

The projects described above will no doubt provide increased access to historical newspaper content, but to make a significant impact, these activities need to become part of a curated, sustainable program with dedicated funding, equipment, and staff. The BPL is committed to continuing participation in Library of Congress’s NDNP program, which can be renewed every two years. The Digital Services team is also actively investigating other ways to increase capacity, including grant programs, advocating for more funding from the state legislature, adding staff to help manage digitization projects, and providing guidance to institutions that want to take on their own digitization projects. As with all things Digital Commonwealth, collaboration will be key to success!

Paul Revere’s Engraving

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Paul Revere, “The bloody massacre perpetrated in King-Street Boston : on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th regt.”(1770), Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department.

Paul Revere’s engraving, “The Bloody Massacre,” is part of Boston Public Library’s “Colonial and Revolutionary Boston”, one of Digital Commonwealth’s “Collections of Distinction”.

Scholars agree that Revere copied the arresting image in “The Bloody Massacre” from an engraving by Henry Pelham entitled “Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre” (1770).  Pelham wrote to Paul Revere complaining about the theft of his intellectual property. “If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act, the World will not be so.” (Clarence Brigham, “Boston Massacre, 1770, ” Paul Revere’s Engravings (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1954) ) .

While Henry Pelham may have felt that Paul Revere would be chastened for his appropriation of another man’s work, the world felt otherwise. “Certain it is that Revere was an outstanding patriot and saw the opportunity of furthering the patriot cause by circulating so significant a print.”(Brigham, p. 56).

Pelham, the artist who first rendered the image, was a Loyalist. In a letter to his sister-in-law, Susanna, the wife of John Singleton Copley, he wrote “Now we see this Country arming themselves and unsupported by any foreign Power ungenerously Waging War against their great Benefactors, and endeavouring to Ruin that State to whom they owe their being. . . “ ( Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776 , Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914, p. 344)  The Copleys had left Boston for England in 1774, and Henry would follow them in 1776.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, “The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, or ‘The Executions’” (1814), Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Call to Arms or Lamentation?

On the one year anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere put together a striking exhibit in the windows of his home, displaying work depicting the “Tyranny of the British Administration of Government.” “The Bloody Massacre” was included in the illuminated display. The Boston Gazette reported that “the Spectators, which amounted to many Thousands, were struck with solemn Silence, and their Countenances covered with a melancholy Gloom.”

Goya’s monumental work, “The 3rd of May 1808” has been compared with Paul Revere’s engraving. While the scale of the works is very different, the subject matter and the composition are very similar. The 82 prints in Goya’s series, Los desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), published 35 years after Goya’s death, argue that Goya was painting about the horrors of war, not trying to create propaganda. Paul Revere’s engraving poses more of a question, asking his fellow citizens to respond. “The prints were intended as propaganda. . . “( Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere, American Antiquarian Society online resource, 2020).

Say Their Names, compassion for the victims

Samuel Gray. Samuel Maverick. James Caldwell. Crispus Attucks. These men were victims of members of a British regiment on King Street in Boston on March 5, 1770. James Caldwell and Crispus Attucks had no family or home in Boston, and Samuel Adams organized a procession to transport their caskets to Faneuil Hall, where they lay in state for three days before their public funeral. The people of Boston held a funeral procession for all of the victims, and they were buried in Boston in the Granary Burying Ground.

Crispus Attucks was a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry. The significance of his death has been a matter of debate for the last 250 years, argued in three different intertwining threads:

  1. He was the leader of a mob. This was John Adams’s argument in a Courtroom in 1770 when he defended William Wemms and seven other British soldiers. Adams described Attucks as “a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify an person” (Adams Papers, Digital Edition, volume 3, p. 269, Historical Society) . This was also the (unsuccessful) position of the Massachusetts Historical Society when they opposed a monument to Attucks on the Boston Common in 1887 (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Second Series, Vol. 3, [Vol. 23 of continuous numbering] (1886 – 1887), pp. 313-318).
  2. He was an African American hero who should be acknowledged and memorialized. This was William C. Nell’s argument when he advocated for an annual celebration of Crispus Attucks Day on March 5 and wrote The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in the 1850s.
  3. He was an American hero. John Boyle O’Reilly’s poem at the 1888 dedication of the memorial on the Boston Common (p.56) captures the idea that Crispus Attucks represented all Americans:

“And so must we come to the learning of Boston’s lesson to-day                                                                                                                                                                                           

The moral that Crispus Attucks taught in the old heroic way,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

God made mankind to be one in blood, as one in spirit and thought. . . “

Paul Revere, engraver, [Four coffins of men killed in the Boston Massacre] (1770), Revere Collection, American Antiquarian Society.
“Digital Commonwealth provides support for the creation, management, and dissemination of cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives.”

from the Digital Commonwealth Statement of Values, Adopted by the Board on October 19, 2021.

“The study of history can be an effective tool against racism and can support better understanding of the experience of Black people. However, archives are not neutral; they are created by people and reflect the power structures that those people are influenced by and participate in. We must choose what our non-neutrality means. In this moment, we specifically affirm that Black lives matter and that we support efforts to dismantle oppression and injustice.”

from Statement from Digital Commonwealth Board on Black Lives Matter, Adopted by the Board on June 16, 2020.

Barbara Schneider, Member Outreach and Education Committee

Focus on Orra White Hitchcock, “An Amherst Woman of Art and Science”

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Drawing of octopus devouring a ship [ca. 1828-1840]
Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, Amherst, MA
“The wife of Edward Hitchcock ( (1796–1864)  geologist, theologian, professor and for a decade president of Amherst College), Orra White Hitchcock  produced dozens of striking watercolors of native plants, picturesque lithographs of the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers, symbolic compositions and drawings of prehistoric fossils as well as large, colorful geological designs for her husband’s lectures. Self-taught, she rose to become the principal female illustrator of her generation in the United States.”

From Orra White Hitchcock (1796–1863): An Amherst Woman of Art and Science , the title of a 2011 exhibition at Mead Art Gallery at Amherst College and a exhibition catalogue by Robert L. Herbert and Daria D’Arienzo. Thumbnails of the art work in the exhibition are available online in an  Orra White Hitchcock Checklist; the images show the range of her work. Hitchcock’s watercolors of native plants deserve particular note. Between 1817 and 1821, she created Herberium Parvum Pictum, a 64 page album of watercolors depicting approximately 175 flower and grass specimens from her husband’s native plant collection.

Autumnal Scenery , View in Amherst
Hand-colored lithograph created from the original painting by Orra White Hitchcock (1833)
Jones Library, Amherst, Special Collections

“In 1830, Edward [Hitchcock] was appointed state geologist for Massachusetts and over the next two years, Orra prepared drawings for the lithographs for his massive Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts, published by the Commonwealth in 1833.”

From Orra White Hitchcock (1796–1863): An Amherst Woman of Art and Science by Robert L. Herbert and Daria D’Arienzo, distributed by University Press of New England, p. 31.

“Orra White Hitchcock Classroom Drawings” is a Digital Commonwealth Collection consisting of 61 drawings by Orra White Hitchcock, made for use in her husband’s geology and natural history classes at Amherst College.

Orra White Hictchcock drawing of woolly mammoth skeleton [ca. 1828-1840]
Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, Amherst, MA
 “Given the obvious compatibility – indeed, synergy – between art and science, it is puzzling that the two fields have been perceived over the centuries as polarized. Fortunately, this divide is beginning to narrow. Journals as prestigious as Nature now carry regular reviews of art exhibits with relevance to science, for example. Orra White Hitchcock was one of a handful of plucky and observant women in her time whom we know bridged science and art. She can continue to provide inspiration for creative people, unencumbered by traditional roles, who want to celebrate the natural world – and all the wondrous discoveries still to be made.”

Elizabeth Farnsworth, “A Scientific Illustrator Looks Back at Orra White Hitchcock” in Orra White Hitchcock (1796–1863): An Amherst Woman of Art and Science, pp. 47-48.

Orra White Hitchcock drawing of valleys [ca. 1828-1840] Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, Amherst, MA
Through collaboration with institutions like Amherst College and the Jones Library (Amherst), Digital Commonwealth brings together curated collections of materials in a wide variety of formats. Digital Commonwealth (DC) provides a single online point of access for collections from over 200 member institutions.  DC is the host for Amherst College Archives & Special Collections’ “Orra White Hitchcock Classroom Drawings” .  Over fifteen hundred collections can be searched online on the DC website.