Over a century of Pincher Creek history is being preserved thanks to a project between the University of Lethbridge and Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village.
Hard copy editions for the Pincher Creek Echo have been digitized. The story of the southern Alberta newspaper goes back well over a hundred years.
On August 15, 1900, Elias T. Saunders published the Rocky Mountain Echo in Pincher Creek as the first issue of the weekly paper.
It became the Pincher Creek Echo in 1906 and in early 2023, Post Media eliminated its print edition, converting it to a digital-only release.
Gord Tolton, education coordinator and collections manager at the Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village in Pincher Creek says it was around that time that the Community Foundation of Lethbridge and Southwestern Alberta suggested the digitization project.
Tolton says through a partnership with the U of L’s library, they have digitized decades of issues of the Pincher Creek Echo.
“Our village, as a receptacle for history of southwestern Alberta, has always had donations of a number of these hard copies of these Echo [newspapers], going back to day one, which is phenomenal for us to have them, but let’s face it, it’s a very rare medium that can hold that kind of information for that kind of [time], especially on news print, so mostly that’s usually meant as a disposable means,” Told says.
He notes hard copies of the papers are fragile, so the museum has to limit access to them in order to keep them in good condition.
“It’s always been our dream to try to make this a little more high tech and limit access to not only the hard copies of the papers because they’re just getting fragile and more fragile all the time, but also to the micro-form readers because the technology to read those things is very scarce as well – you don’t find many of these readers – even libraries have gotten rid of them just because they take up space and no one really wants to look at them,” Tolton remarks. “The future is digital so digitize it. That’s the best way to do it.”
Tolton says the U of L had already started digitizing items on its publicly accessible online library, so the next step for the Pincher Creek team was to find an outside contractor that could digitize the physical newspapers at the museum.
That contractor was found in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Physical copies were sent to the United States to be transformed to a digital format.
Tolton adds that as of now, the online library features issues from 1900 to the early 1970s, with the plan to digitize up to December 31, 2023.
He explains they do have to be careful when it comes to copyright.
“Right now, the papers that are on there are in the public domain,” Tolton says.
“Echo is still a copyrighted item, so what we are going to do is [make] sure that we go up to 2023 with our digitization, so we’ll carry on this process, and we’ll provide files to the U of L, and they’ll bring them on as that is legally possible.”
POSITIVE FEEDBACK
Tolton says the project has received a positive response from the community.
He notes the heritage museum gets several requests a week from people looking for information on their ancestors and history in the town.
He believes digitizing the collection will make it easier and more accessible for students, historians and the community to conduct research for different projects.
“We’re a small museum and we’re just a little bit behind on our database entry, so it gets a little bit tough to go through all this physical media, so now this sets us light years ahead.”
The digitized newspapers can be viewed online through the U of L digital library website.
