BOISE -- Steve Barrett has worked at the Idaho State Historical Society archives for 16 years.
"I learn seven new things every day," he said.
Or seven old things. After all, part of his job is preserving old newspapers, such as the Idaho Avalanche from 1878 that he showed KTVB.
"They're priceless. They're absolutely priceless," Barrett said.
Newspapers have been rolling off the printing presses in Idaho since at least 1864. The archives were converted to microfilm in the 1980's with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to preserve the old papers.
There are racks and racks of rolls of microfilm in a vault on the second floor of the archives. But technology keeps changing, and the Historical Society is detirmined to keep up.
"It's revolutionizing how history is being written," said Barrett. "How it's being studied and how it's being written."
"It's a really big deal!" said ISHS Executive Director Janet Gallimore.
What executive director Janet Gallimore is talking about is the new $250,000 grant the Idaho State Historical Society just got from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It will pay to digitize 100,000 pages of Idaho newspapers published between 1864 and 1923.
The project focuses on those years because newpapers published before 1923 are in the public domain, meaning they are not protected by copyright, so they are available to the public as a whole.
Those digitized pages will then be posted on the Chronicling America website through the Library of Congress along with newspapers from every other state.
The goal: to make it easy for students, historians and anyone with access to a computer to get the information.
"Having it digitized provides everyone access so they don't have to come to the archives or we don't have to pull those original microfilms, which are really the preservation record of all of those newspapers," said Gallimore.
Plus, all those articles will be keyword searchable.
"In the old days, if you were a historian and you were doing research on a topic, you had to go through every page of every newspaper hoping a headline would leap out at you," said Barrett.
This is actually the second grant the historical society has received from the NEH for the National Digital Newspaper Project. The ISHS also digitized 100,000 pages of historic newspapers in 2014.
"That kind of funding we just would not be able to secure at the local level," said Gallimore.
It opens up a vast archive of articles.
"You can go through them really quickly," said Barrett.
To view the Chronicling America website, click here.
