Preserving Kentucky’s Newspapers: Analogue Beginnings to Digital Frontier

Abstract

Over fifty years ago an historian and a library director traveled the back roads of Kentucky (USA) with a portable microfilm camera, two lights, and a dream of preserving Kentucky’s newspapers. From their ambitions arose a successful newspaper preservation program at the University of Kentucky Libraries (UKL). Now in its sixth decade, the program has developed a new way of preserving contemporary born-digital newspapers. This paper explores some of the people and events behind the early success of UKL’s program, as well as an in-depth look at the development and functionality of Paper Vault: a largely automated, in-house process delivering and preserving Kentucky’s born-digital contemporary newspapers.