The Bothell Historical Museum Society is seeking $3,500 in community donations by Jan. 1 to help digitize the community’s pioneer newspapers. The project has been dubbed “Spread the News.”
The object of this digitizing is twofold: to make the newspaper content available online to the public and to capture the visual content before the deteriorating newspapers succumb to age, according to project coordinator Margaret Turcott.
Contributions can sent to ‘Spread the News’ Project c/o Bothell Historical Museum, P.O. Box 313, Bothell, WA 98041. Museum president Don Sparling noted the museum society is a 501C-3 organization, hence any donation before Jan. 1 is a 2013 tax deduction.
More information is available from project coordinator Turcott at mturcott@comcast.net.
The Bothell Branch of the King County Library is teaming with the museum to make the newspapers available through a searchable website. Some of the newspapers are available on microfilm at the Bothell Library Branch and at the University of Washington’s Suzzalo Library, while others are in local storage. But access to the files is available only at the source.
Digitizing available editions of the original Bothell Independent and Bothell Sentinel, published between 1903 and 1935, would cost approximately $10,500. This estimate comes from a dedicated company in Shelton, Wash. called SmallTownPapers that provides digitizing and web-hosting for community newspapers around the world and offers searchable websites to communities. The particulars can be viewed at smalltownpapers.com.
The Bothell Historical Society recently was awarded a $3,000 grant from King County’s 4Culture organization to begin the digitization process. The historical society was able to contribute another $3,000 from its own funds. An anonymous donor has offered an additional $1,000 if the community provides the remaining $3,500. Donors’ names would appear on the SmallTownPapers website for Bothell newspapers.
The Jan. 1 deadline for donations has been set because SmallTownPapers agreed to guarantee its price until that date. The company’s current price is established on a per-page basis. Because some of the early newspapers are crumbling, it is difficult to determine a page total without damage in examining them. The estimate is about 20,000 individual pages.
Bothell has had four locally owned newspapers: The Bothell Independent (only one physical copy exists: Jan. 1, 1903), the Bothell Sentinel (published intermittently from 1908 to 1935), the Bothell Citizen (1933 to 1960) and the Northshore Citizen (1961 to 2001).
For more information contact Margaret Turcott at mturcott@comcast.net.
