Murphy Shewchuk, president of the NVMA. (David Dyck/Herald)

Murphy Shewchuk, former president of the NVMA. (David Dyck/Herald)

No need to comb through dusty old archives — back issues of the Herald are now available online.

The project to digitize old copies of the Herald and the Merritt News — a local newspaper that has since gone out of print — has been a long and labour-intensive one, but the results are impressive.

“For hundreds of years we will be able to refer to these digital records, rather than having those dogeared pages stored in libraries — the way you see them so often — or the way you see them in newspaper sheds or shacks that are hard to access and become damaged over time,” said Thompson Nicola Regional Director chair John Ranta, at the official launch event last Thursday (Feb. 11).

It’s called the Newshound Newspaper Digitization Project, a partnership between the TNRD Library System, the Nicola Valley Museum and Archives, TRU and the Kamloops Museum and Archives.

The eventual goal is to digitize every newspaper that has ever been published within the TNRD.

“It’s interesting that one of the contributors to this project is the Ike Barber Learning Centre which is at UBC,” said Ranta.

“Ike Barber of course made his money as the head of Slocan Forest Products and I suspect some of what he did was produce pulp for newspaper. Now we’re spending money to archive those newspapers digitally, so it would be a bit of a challenge there for Ike I’m sure, if he were still alive.”

John Ranta, TNRD chair. (David Dyck/Herald)

John Ranta, TNRD chair. (David Dyck/Herald)

A bulk of the monotonous legwork was done by Murphy Shewchuk and Tom Edwards, past president and current president of the Nicola Valley Museum and Archives, respectively.

“They spent hundreds of hours strategizing about how to digitize the Merritt Herald, as well as countless other hundreds of hours photographing all the pages of all the newspapers over time,” said Ranta.

The device they used was on display as well, a camera fixed to a stand, pointing down at the surface where one page of the newspaper would be photographed at a time.

According to Shewchuk, the record was 1,400 shots in a day, still a drop in the bucket compared to the total of 100,000 pages. And that wasn’t the end of the job, as the images had to be converted from various shades of brown — which 100-year-old newspapers tended to be — to black and white.

The project can be accessed at arch.tnrdlib.ca, where users can search by keyword, date or issue.