Preserving pages from Analy’s past

How a new museum project sheds light on Analy High School's history through the digitalization of student newspapers

The special digitization equipment used to scan and preserve the old student newspapers. (Photo by Lawson Gaylord)

Analy’s student newspaper has always been a valuable outlet of student writing: student’s opinions, concerns, dreams, and ambitions. However, today, we can get a glimpse of what Analy students were thinking about in the past. Over the past several months, volunteers at the West County Museum in Sebastopol have been working on a special, Analy-themed project: documenting and digitizing historical copies of the Analy student newspaper.

The West County Museum, which is run by the Western Sonoma County Historical Society, is located on Main Street just south of downtown in what was once Sebastopol’s railroad depot. The museum has history ingrained in its very walls.

The West County Museum in downtown Sebastopol, where old Analy student newspapers are being digitized and preserved. (Photo by Donna Pittman)

Inside, volunteers organize countless artifacts regarding Sebastopol’s history, including collections of the Sebastopol Times newspapers, old railroad relics, posters from apple fairs long ago, and now, a nearly complete collection of the Analy student newspaper dating back to 1921.

“It’s our job to maintain and grow a collection of historic artifacts from the community,” said Museum Director Donna Pittman, noting that it is their job to “tell the story of our town.”

The current project for the museum is digitizing the student newspapers, which requires both community effort to locate historical newspapers and also scanning every page of every issue, so it can be viewed online.

Mary Dodgion, the museum’s archivist, explains this process: “The equipment we are using is on loan from newspapers.com and includes a digital camera with overhead mount equipment, two high-LED light pads, and a laptop with photo shooting software.” Effectively, they are using a camera mounted above a table, rather than a traditional scanner, as it makes the process much quicker. This equipment is on loan for a limited period of time.

Finding copies of old Analy newspapers proved to be a struggle. “We were given a big chunk of papers from Loretta Castleberry,” Dodgion said. “She happened to be at the right place at the right time, when she found that the newspapers were headed to the dumpster.” Castleberry brought the stack of newspapers straight to the museum. “I inventoried them by dates and knew more existed and wanted to fill it in. By word of mouth, we began looking for the missing issues.”

Eventually, this word of mouth reached our current Analy newspaper team, which publishes West County World. After a bit of searching and with the help of Analy social science teacher Rachel Ambrose, two old boxes of newspapers were located. The West County World team brought them to the museum. After a bit of inventorying, the museum was able to significantly increase their collection. They still are missing quite a few issues, but after the combined work of many community members, the museum has been able to put together a significant collection of Analy newspapers.

Now, the papers will be digitized and uploaded online so people from across our community can view them.

“The goal of the project is to make all of the high school newspapers available to the public,” Dodgion said. The newspapers, which have had five names over the years (The Analyan, Blue Prints, Analy Independent, Tiger Times, and West County World), will be available for anyone to read online as soon as the digitization process is finished.

The digitalization project took another step forward this week when the museum raised enough money with its first-ever, four-day Holiday Store fundraiser to purchase its own scanning and digitizing equipment.

Lawson Gaylord is the club director of the Analy Journalism Club and editor-in-chief of westcountyworld.org. He is also helping the museum with their digitalization efforts.

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