Montgomery’s Historical Society Offers to Host Gazette Digital Archive
The Montgomery County Historical Society has offered to manage the digital archives of the now-defunct Gazette newspapers.
Matt Logan, executive director of the Montgomery County Historical Society, said he has called officials at The Gazette to offer the society as a landing spot for the digital documents of the newspaper that published its last edition June 17. Officials at The Gazette, he said, have not returned his call.
According to sources at The Gazette, the newspaper’s website will be searchable through July.
“I have not talked to them but this is my hope,” he told MyMCMedia. “Clearly they view us as an obvious place to store the resources for the community but if they have other plans we will work around that.”
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos bought the weekly papers in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties when he bought the Post in 2013. Kristine Coratti Kelly, vice president of communications for The Washington Post, said in an email to MyMCMedia that the company is looking at the option of archiving the Gazette, but did not have any additional information.
The Historical Society already has about 400 boxes of Gazette newspapers from 1969 to the early 1990s stored in a warehouse in Frederick, according to Logan. Those newspapers already are decaying.
“They are not old enough to be recognized as having tremendous historic value where can get funding to digitize them,” Logan said.
The cost to do so is estimated at $700,000, he said.
The Historical Society is undergoing its own digitization archive effort creating a new web platform and cloud-based storage. The society serves as the county’s official government archives.
“Digitizing is very labor intensive. The challenge is accessibility. If you don’t have good search terms and tags on the information it might as well be invisible,” Logan said.
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Montgomery's Historical Society Offers to Host Gazette Digital Archive
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