Active and Retroactive Digital Newspaper Preservation

The University of Kentucky Libraries’ (UKL) long-running efforts to document and provide access to the state’s history via newspaper preservation have necessarily evolved over the last 80 years. As news formats and preservation technologies have changed, particularly in relation to born-digital media, the libraries’ efforts have had to keep pace. The race to preserve these materials before they disappear or are locked away on media inaccessible to modern computers is not always chronologically linear, though. Digital archivists and librarians must sometimes straddle multiple generations of technology to successfully migrate, capture, and otherwise preserve digital publications, and there is no single guidebook to navigate the many ways to do so. This paper will explore ongoing efforts to preserve born-digital additions to the UKL’s Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program collection, including a discontinued bilingual newspaper that arrived in our collection as a box of 326 discs in varying states of decomposition, as well as web archiving for actively published newspapers that are entirely and exclusively online publications.