PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — Andrew Feight is a professor of history and directs the Center for Public History at Shawnee State University.
He and his students are in the midst of organizing, unboxing and taking inventory of 160 years of Portsmouth’s history.
The project covers 18 different titles, including daily and weekly publications from much of Portsmouth’s 19th and 20th century history.
It’s a community-wide effort that began five years ago when the “Peerless City” newspaper history was donated by Civitas Media, owners of the Portsmouth Daily Times.
“The owners were looking for a solution on what to do with the papers, somehow to save them. And a former student working at the paper at the time contacted me. It’s just invaluable for genealogists as well as historians of Portsmouth, but also of Ohio,” says Feight.
Anastasia Sopchak is one of Feight’s students assisting in the project, working on inventory.
She hopes to pursue a master’s degree in library sciences and says the opportunity to work hands-on with a project of this magnitude is quite rewarding.
“Some of the local history is really interesting and how things have changed over time. A lot of the advertisements I thought were really interested to see,” says Sopchak.
Feight says the project is expected to take about a decade to finish and work to digitize the collection will be outsourced.
But the goal in coming years is to make some of the digital archive searchable and free to the public.
“These papers open up the past to future generations. And making it available to them through digitization ultimately will keep this history alive,” says Feight.
Feight says recovering photographs is one of the greatest values of the newspaper collection.
Hardbound copies are still expected to be available on shelves and the digital archive search engine should be online by 2023.
