From the Archive: Cultural Heritage Digitization Award, Part 1

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In the fall of 2025, Hancock County Library administrative staff were hard at work sorting through cabinets in the old Board Room that was slated to become the new space for the Second Line Bookstore.  This move gave us a chance to understand the scope of the collection of library ephemera that had been meticulously clipped and saved for decades.  Shelves and shelves of scrapbooks dating back to 1934 were discovered, the oldest of which were fragile with brittle pages crumbling at the edges.  We were excited at the scope of the collection entirely dedicated to the history and growth of what would become the Hancock County Library System.  We immediately thought of digitizing these scrapbooks and sharing their knowledge with our community, but we knew we needed a partner to help with the most fragile items and lay a foundation for success.

Over the next several weeks, I wrote up the project and applied for Mississippi Digital Library’s annual Cultural Heritage Digitization Award.  The CHDA was an opportunity to get experts to digitize our fragile collection, plus guidance and training to develop experience for staff and volunteers.  In January our project was selected as a finalist.  We met with MDL representatives to discuss the collection.  It was an honor and an exciting time for us, sharing the scrapbooks and discussing what we would need to do to work through a digitization project.

From left: 1. One of the oldest scrapbooks from 1937 contains newspaper clippings from the first years of the Hancock County W.P.A. Library.  2. We like to imagine head Librarian Louise A. Crawford clipping and notating each article as the library project grew each year.  3. The front page dedicates this scrapbook to Louise Crawford as she retired after 24 years of serving Hancock County.  4. Stacks of the oldest scrapbooks identified for the CHDA project application, now stored in our new archive space.

In February of 2026, we were notified by Mississippi Digital Library that we had been selected for this year’s Cultural Heritage Digitization Award.  MDL announced the selectionand local news WXXV covered the award.  I met with MDL’s Director, Elizabeth La Beaud, and Coordinator, Hannah Dean, in March to go over the work plan.  Each scrapbook would need to be reviewed for copyright and processed to get them ready to be scanned.  I also would need to create descriptive metadata—information including a title, dates, subjects, and more that described the digital object and the content within—to make the items searchable and accessible for viewers.  Several staff and HCLS partners attended a virtual training session in March to go over how to create the metadata for this and future projects.   

The first part of the project involved a review of the scrapbooks.  I documented each item in a spreadsheet, including metadata elements, notes, and copyright information.  Most of the scrapbooks include newspaper clippings with dates before 1978.  Because early 20th century copyright laws required formalities to establish copyright—like registering and/or renewing a work with the U. S. Copyright Office and specific construction and placement of copyright notices on the work itself—most of the content falls within the Public Domain.  The risk of third-party content (articles or advertisements) having copyright status in a Public Domain newspaper was not an issue for this project, as only clipped articles were included.  I reached out to publishers to alert them of the project and request permission regardless of copyright status, as a handful of the scrapbooks do contain content still in copyright and we hope to digitize all the scrapbooks down the road.  In addition to published newspapers, the clippings included magazines and newsletters, including The Packet from the Mississippi Library Commission (the full collection can be found online). 

Work progresses in the new archive space as information about each scrapbook is logged in a spreadsheet.

The primary source of library news clipped for these scrapbooks was The Sea Coast Echo.  Hancock County Library System and Sea Coast Echo owners formalized a Memorandum of Understanding in 2025 allowing HCLS to digitize and host online collections of archived newspapers.  While researching copyright, I realized that not only was the Hancock County Eagle purchased by Sea Coast Echo owners, the earlier Gulf Coast Progress was also purchased by Sea Coast Echo founding publisher in 1929.  Publications that responded to my request for permission included the Times-Picayune and the Sun Herald.  This review process informs the metadata for the Rights element that will be displayed in the public collection, but also determines if certain pages or items need to be excluded from the public.  Where permission has been given for copyrighted materials, the public collection will reflect that they are responsible for following copyright laws for any use of material beyond personal research and education purposes.

This series will continue with Part 2 as the project moves to processing the physical items to get them ready to scan and creating item-level metadata…