News Photo by Darby Hinkley Latitude Brown, in front, and Madison Haack, are first-year graduate students at the University of Michigan. They are seen in the archives at the Alpena County Library on Feb. 29. Brown is studying library science to become a librarian, and Haack is studying to become an academic librarian.

ALPENA — Last week, the Alpena County Library hosted two graduate students from the University of Michigan to help start work on digitizing The Alpena News archives to make them searchable through a computerized database.

“This is part of their alternative spring break option, where they can get real-world experience in archives,” said Special Collections Librarian Don La Barre. “We are very fortunate. We submitted to be a host or a client, and they thought the project was a good idea.”

He explained the project in more detail.

“Within The Alpena News collection that we have, we have a substantial amount of negatives that were created between the ’60s to the ’80s, by newspaper staff and their photographers,” La Barre said. “It’s currently organized purely on the week in which it was published. Other than that, there’s no descriptive nature to it. It’s a very big project, and we’re at the very beginning of it.”

He said the entire project will take years, but he is happy to get started on it.

“Our end goal is to have a newspaper negative collection that is accessible, that is searchable, and that is tagged correctly,” La Barre said. “These students are the beginning wave. They’re creating the standard operating procedures. They’re providing input to me and showing me options. They’re setting the groundwork.”

He said the graduate students are matching the negatives to the pictures in the archive books of The Alpena News.

“It’s everyday life of Alpena, for basically 20 years,” La Barre added. “It’s an incredibly rich collection.”

The graduate students are matching up the title, publication date, page number, who’s in the photo, organizations in the photo, describing the photo, all before transferring that into the library’s collections management software called Archive Space.

“It’s not public yet,” La Barre said of the software. “We’re slowly building it … I always equate it to our own internal Google.”

He said once complete, this project will allow patrons to access the information they are seeking in a much more efficient manner.

“It’s a really powerful tool for the community,” La Barre said.

The students enjoyed participating in the project.

“It’s so cool to look in an archive and be in the community that the archive is in,” said Latitude Brown, a first-year graduate student at U of M who interned last week at the Alpena County Library. “These hard-bound newspapers are like time machines.”

“Here, from what I’ve seen, people seem to be very interested in the past,” Haack said. “Or just wanted to get connected to the past. So, I think it’s really important to do projects like these, because otherwise, there’s a a very large barrier to finding out more about it.”