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The Only Way Out is Through: a Mixed Methods Approach for Reformatting Projects at Scale

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The University of Houston's (UH) student newspaper, the Daily Cougar, has chronicled the academic and cultural history of our institution for almost 100 years. In this presentation, we'll discuss how we approached reformatting and making available online the entire run of this publication from its first printed issue in 1928 to the born-digital version produced by student journalists today. As the newspaper and modes of print production evolved over the last century, so did the preservation and reformatting approaches engaged by librarians, presenting our team a complicated project to tackle. Rather than starting from the beginning and applying a uniform approach, as we've done for other reformatting projects at UH Libraries, we'll discuss why we're taking a mixed methods approach to reformatting for this project, utilizing a combination of vendor-based and in-house imaging strategies to address the varying needs of the newspaper's materials; ensuring its long-term availability to researchers, students, and the public. After a series of false starts and initial efforts beginning in 2016, we reapproached the project with renewed commitment in 2023. The scope of work is enormous, with an estimated 100,000+ pages for the entire run from 1928 to present. We opted to reformat from microfilm masters when possible, and digitize individual issues in-house when the microfilm master wasn't available. This hybrid model balances efficiency with preservation, ensuring that materials in the most precarious condition are handled with the utmost care while work already done in the past to microfilm the newspaper isn't unnecessarily duplicated. Additionally, we are working with the current editorial team of Daily Cougar to receive PDFs of more recent issues from the past decade, ensuring that the newspaper's modern history is integrated into the digital archive. Our approach benefits from the lessons learned in previous large-scale digitization efforts, including our successful Theses and Dissertations digitization project. Through these earlier initiatives, our library developed a robust infrastructure for managing large volumes of digitized content, optimizing workflows, and ensuring high standards of metadata and quality control. These foundational experiences have enabled us to embark on the Daily Cougar project with confidence, knowing that we have the systems in place to manage and scale the work effectively while providing time to iterate and improve existing workflows and processes as part of this effort. In this presentation we'll focus on how we've project managed each approach taken as part of this holistic effort, collaborating with multiple stakeholders and departments, and present cost and outcome comparisons for librarians, archivists, and visual resources professionals considering similarly large digitization initiatives. Looking forward, this project is just the beginning of a broader effort to expand access to the UH's historical records. Future initiatives include expanding the digitization of other key university publications, developing advanced search capabilities for our digital collections, and enhancing user engagement through innovative tools for discovery and analysis. By reformatting The Daily Cougar, we are not only preserving a vital piece of university history and ensuring that it remains an accessible, engaging resource for researchers to come.
DOI: 10.17613/256f2-rjj81
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7092444554
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