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http://www.omniture.com --> Sections Home Page Local News AP News Blogs Archives Business Classifieds Event Calendar Forums Life Opinion Obituaries Multimedia Photo Gallery Readers Photo Gallery Sports Tempo Weather Road Cams Special Coverage 2006 Britt Festivals --> Shop Our Valley AutoFinder HomeFinder JobFinder Search Our Valley Special Sections Distinctly Northwest Readers' Choice Homelife Magazine Joy Magazine Oregon Golf Info Oregon Wine Info Other Publications Local Links Ashland News eSouthernOregon Newspapers In Education Personals Moving Here Movie Listings TV Listings Volunteer Customer Service Advertise With Us Media Kit Place Classified Ad Contact Us FAQ's Home Delivery Site Map --> Email Story to a Friend March 5, 2007 Click image for larger view SOU history major Shanna Foley scans in a historical document for the Southern Oregon Digital Archive. (Mail Tribune / Jim Craven) Scanning history Parts of Southern Oregon's rich history are available online, thanks to SOU's digital archiving project By John Darling for the Mail Tribune Psst. Wanna see beautiful old color photos of Southern Oregon, check out everything you ever wanted to know about Crater Lake or study the science around the Mount Ashland expansion? How about reading a pioneer diary from the Oregon Trail, looking up some council minutes from decades ago or boning up on the language of the Takelma Indians, as collected by ethnographer Edward Sapir in the 1880s? It's all there in the Southern Oregon Digital Archives and — with its new regional history collection online and its bioregion archive greatly expanded — Southern Oregon University's hefty, 28-gigabyte databank is just a click away at soda.sou.edu online. However, with staggering budget cuts hitting everywhere on campus, the Hannon library staff has only through 2008, when its $41,000 federal grant ends, to digitize as much as it can. After that, they will probably be able to find the money to keep it running, but not add much, said Mary Jane Cedar Face, production development librarian. So, staff members are traveling to many historical societies, libraries and government agencies in the area to borrow old paper documents and photos, get them scanned to professional standards and catalogued into three main collections: Southern Oregon History, Bioregion and First Nation (American Indian) collections, she said. Advertisement "We're borrowing it and bringing it all to one location, with two goals — access and preservation," Cedar Face said. In addition to an array of scholars and government employees, "what we're seeing is high school students using it to research a paper, environmentalists using it to comment on an environmental impact statement, American Indians using it for tribal revitalization, students learning how to collect oral histories." While a lot of the 3,000 volumes, publications and documents now online are fascinating to the general public — which would have great difficulty finding or even learning about them tucked away in agencies and libraries — much of it is "gray material," the day-to-day reports, memos, contracts and such that hold together the machinery of society, said Kate Cleland-Sipfle, overseer of the history window. One example — letters and reports by veterans advocate Albert Cedros in 1948, as he lobbied to get the Veterans Domiciliary started at defunct Camp White, now White City. If they weren't digitized and put online, it's unlikely anyone would ever see them again. The same goes for more than 100 years of history of the Rogue River National Forest, put together by author-historian Jeff LaLande, who retires this year and is slated to ship all the documents off to the National Archives in Seattle. "We've got a one-year window to scan it all," said Cedar Face, who expressed delight in the "ground-breaking agreement" with the National Archives and in the fact that it's being preserved in a place accessible to the public, presumably for the indefinite future. Another online favorite is the 1917 book, "Oregon the Picturesque," by Thomas Douglas Murphy, with 33 classic color plates and engravings. Soon to go online are commercial club booster pamphlets for early settlers, early maps (big ones digitized by Pacific Survey Supply in Medford) and personal histories about ranching, orchards, mining and other ways of life in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Documents don't have to be old to make it on SODA, because, said Cedar Face, even the land-use planning decisions and policies of the 1980s will soon be history — and modern folk will want to know how and why things got to be the way they are. Having taken on responsibility as the digital repository for the State of Jefferson area (Southern Oregon and Northern California), SOU staffers set up partnering relationships with Coos County Library, Coos Historical and Maritime Museum, Chetco Community Public Library, Gold Beach Public Library, Port Orford Public Library, Curry Historical Society, Douglas County Museum of History and Natural History, Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, Southern Oregon Historical Society, Jackson County Library System and Josephine County Library System. Borrowed materials, some of them unique and crumbling, must be handled with gloves and stored in the secure special collections room. All authors and photographers must give permission, a laborious process, especially for older publications. However, all materials before 1923 are considered public domain. The material is highly searchable, thanks to expensive software with Optical Character Recognition that allows accurate translation of old typed or smudged words — and supports a search for varied spellings. It's been a long-time dream of scholars and librarians to get the greatest amount of information in the smallest amount of space, accessible to the largest number of people with the least amount of physical travel and searching — and enduring in a stable medium for the longest number of years. It's also part of the regional engagement mission SOU has set for itself, said Cleland-Sipfle, noting, "We're not an ivory tower. We're trying to be relevant with this." Surprisingly, almost 10 percent of cyber-visitors are from Asia, especially Korea, with Western Europe a close second. Big clusters of users hail from Portland, Eugene, Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley), New York, Virginia and Washington state. Asian users, coping with environmental problems, mainly studies the bioregion collection. The university has always had strong collections and significant gifts of papers and personal collections, especially in old ethnographies and American Indian dictionaries — and digitized its own collection first, using a four-year grant from the Library Services and Technology Act. The Wiyot tribe, mostly annihilated on the Northern California coast in an 1860 attack by settlers, was recently surprised to find the dictionary of its ancient language on SODA, said Cedar Face. SOU knows it doesn't have the money, time or staff to digitize everything, so it must pick and choose to give a representative sample in many cases. For example, it's only putting 120 of Douglas County's 400 oral histories online. The school also lacks the money and staff to secure and administer more grants that would let it renew its license on the software — and without another grant for that, new material can't be added, said Cedar Face. If you're searching the online SOU library or regional county library catalogs ( www.solis.lib.or.us ), you can link to anything that's been digitized in the SODA files. As Deb Hollens, overseer of the Bioregional collection said, "now everyone can look at all this at home in their jammies at night, with a glass of wine in their hand." John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected]. Would you like to respond to this story? If so Click Here to visit our forums. Advertisement Copyright © 1997-2007 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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