Two separate but related departments at the University of South Carolina are putting the school and the state at the national forefront of newspaper and news film digitization.

At the school’s Moving Image Research Collection, interim director Mark Cooper is overseeing the digitization of the university’s heralded Fox Movietone News collection, which comprises more than 11 million feet of nitrate and acetate film dating from 1919-1934 and from 1942-1944 which, with the destruction in 1978 of 12 million feet of nitrate film by Universal News at the National Archives, constitutes arguably the single most important moving image collection of American news and culture for the periods represented.

To achieve that aim, USC is the only university in the nation with a Kinetta Archival Film Scanner.
 

“The other one is at the Library of Congress,” Cooper says. “We’ve been very fortunate to have one, because this is a brand-new, experimental machine. Essentially, we’re beta testing it for them and working out the kinks. But this will definitely allow us to digitize the Fox material and make it available.”

Cooper is quick to point out that while still in the process of being digitized — “We could do it fairly quickly with enough money,”

Cooper says — the Fox Movietone collection is still available for researchers now.

“Michael Moore’s Capitalism used images from our collection of FDR’s State of the Union speech in 1944 in which he talked about a second Bill of Rights. What makes our collection so interesting is that as opposed to the Universal collection at the National Archives and the Hearst collection at UCLA is that ours is already catalogued and indexed online.”

In addition to the ongoing Movietone digitalization, Cooper’s department just landed the entire Chinese Embassy’s film collection, which spans from the 1940s to the 1990s, thanks to the partnership with the embassy and USC’s fledgling Confucius Institute.

“These were in part the films the embassy used to introduce China to American audiences,” Cooper says. “There are documentaries, fiction, maybe even some animated films. It’s an amazing collection to have and for us to be able to archive.”

But Cooper isn’t overseeing the only team that’s working to put the past online.

Over at the Thomas Cooper Library, digital collections librarian Kate Boyd is working full-steam on the South Carolina Digital Newspaper Project, which will scan and make available online some 10,000 pages from select papers in the state from 1860 to 1922.
Thanks to a grant secured by Boyd from the National Endowment for the Humanities, South Carolina is the only Southeastern state to join the National Digital Newspaper Program.

“The ultimate goal is to have a local South Carolina database that’s more than just what the Library of Congress approves in their technical guidelines,” Boyd says. “Hopefully, once we show what we can do, we can get local grant funding to really get the database off the ground.”

Perhaps the most significant improvement the digitization process offers as opposed to microfilm is that the entire document will be text-searchable.

“That’s just huge,” Boyd says. “It will be such a help and time-saver for people doing research in these papers.”

For Boyd, the next step is announcing a vendor later this month who will handle the entire scanning process using the meta data that Boyd’s team of four has been feverishly working on both at Thomas Cooper and at the South Carolinana libraries.

“Best-case scenario will be to have it finished next summer in terms of the first half being available,” Boyd says. “It’s a fairly lengthy process, so by the time the next grant cycle comes around we should be able to keep moving forward. We’re taking it one grant cycle at a time.”

For examples of what other states have done and what South Carolina’s will look like once completed, visit chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. For updates on the project’s progress, visit scmemory.org. 

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