“We have a unique, interesting history that has been neglected,” said Antonia DiGregorio, SUNY OW’s director of library services. “But little has been done to preserve it.” This will soon change.
Christa DeVirgilio, digital initiative and archives librarian, said she expects to receive a grant early next year of about $4,000 from the Long Island Library Resource Council to digitize nearly all the paper copies of The Catalyst newspaper.
Prior to 1974, there were mimeographed copies called The Gadfly and Abraxas. The digitization will begin from 1974 when the newspaper was officially approved by the faculty senate until 2010 when the use of color started to be used, which requires more costly scans, and when some Internet versions began to be available.
The library may apply for an additional grant to preserve copies of the paper edition from 2010 and beyond. The grant stipulates that the collection has to be accessible and available to the public in one of the digital platforms managed by the various NY library councils.
Digital collections created with these funds will be accessible online without charge to students, teachers, scholars, and citizens of New York State. All digitized assets must be contributed to New York heritage or New York historic news- papers.
They will also be available on the library website. The benefits of having this collection on these platforms is that they will be discoverable and searchable from any search engine by any person on any continent. An estimated 8,000 images have to be digitized. All words will be searchable. The collection should be available to the public by the end of 2023.
Future projects will include material from the files of the late president Dr. Calvin O. Butts III as well as yearbooks, faculty and staff newsletters, college cat- alogues, brochures from the art gallery, the Recital Hall, and the Maguire Theatre as well as material from the Office of Communications and College Relations, which maintains its own archive.
“I am excited to get this project going as I recently found evidence of a similar project that was never funded and inevitably abandoned by a previous librarian around the year 2000, “ said DeVirgilio.
