In mid-November, I joined San Diego librarians in an archiving adventure and special collections tour led by Richard Crawford of the SDPL.
Check out Daria's description:
SLA blog post on the volunteer archiving work party
This was such a great way to get to know the ways public libraries curate local history. Rick Crawford, special collections librarian, also gave us an extensive tour of the basement levels of the library, where staff pages scurry and the remaining Serra Co-op workers live their days.
Even with my electronic serials background, I'm still amazed at how little electronic indexing is done for old newspapers. This essentially means access is dead for direct research. In the San Diego Public Library's basement, where only staff are permitted, lie the only card catalog indexes for pre-1950s San Diego newspapers. This means that patrons cannot glimpse at the article titles, subjects, at all. They must ask librarians to do all early newspaper research themselves.
If these were digitized it would be a boon to researchers, but the amount of money and manpower to transform said index into electronic form does not provide enough incentive!
Even if just the indexes were electronic this would be a huge help.
I'm sure the librarians would welcome a rising star cataloger/database architect to create an electronic index out of the card catalog! Anyone?
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