The Retirement Luncheon on Sunday, May 6 will celebrate two things – or possibly they are really one. The Greenbelt Archive Project (GAP) delightedly announces that the very same Editor Emerita, Mary Lou Williamson, who guided this newspaper through nearly 50 years of success, is the secretary of GAP. The luncheon at the Marriott on Ivy Lane to celebrate her retirement will also be the kickoff for a project to digitize the archive in whose content Williamson has participated for more than 50 of the paper’s 80 years. Participation and donations at this important event will benefit our community.
What price history?
It turns out that the answer is approximately $40,000. That’s roughly how much it will cost to digitize the 25,000 pages of News Reviews and Cooperators currently poorly archived. Perhaps $10k of that will be covered by volunteer labor, but a significant fraction will be required for equipment (approximately $5,000) and to pay skilled interns from the University of Maryland who will coordinate processing of the scans. That’s without paying rent on the approximately 140 square feet of space needed to store and process each batch of papers. The papers are large and fragile, and the page-by-page scans will need managing – automated document feeders aren’t a possibility.
Will scanning work?
The photographs with this article illustrate an archived newspaper – selected, of course, to emphasize the point but representative of many. The left picture is what’s online in our archive. These archives were microfilmed long ago, then copied to another medium. Our existing archive is from scans of copies of that. No surprise, then, that some of the News Review is unreadable. The right item, a scan of the same paper The second item, a scan of the same paper, reveals the statue being maneuvered into place. With further cleanup and image sharpening, Lenore Thomas is visible watching the workmen as they guide it down. The chance to accomplish the scanning project is available now. In 10 years, it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, at any price.
Is it worth it?
With so many other things on the to-do list, that’s worthy of debate. This city was conceived as a social experiment and the history of that experiment is, without self-consciousness, found in this newspaper. The folks who had the babies, dived off the boards into the pool, ran for council, vandalized the school or raced in the soapbox derby weren’t conscious of making history – they were just living the ups and downs of their lives, and as a result there’s no posing or falseness. As families endured the separations of World War II and the tensions of the McCarthy era, their daily lives were witness in a visceral sense of how it felt. The flood of birth announcements after 1945 witnessed the baby boom before it had a name. The fears are documented – and so is what created elation and hope. As concerns changed from gas rationing to condo development and arguments raged successively over the sale of what is now GHI, whether Vietnam protesters should be allowed in the Labor Day Parade or whether the maglev train is good or bad – this community unwittingly reflects itself and its times, without the lens of a historian or the guesswork of archeology. It’s the real deal.
Even today, though it’s not at the top of anybody’s mind – especially of newspaper staff who are just trying, by golly, to meet their weekly deadline – the paper is logging the day-to-day lives of our residents. Stories of sadness, triumph and determination. Scholarships won, Girl Scout cookies sold, parades and a newspaper editor retiring after over 45 years in the hot seat – these are all tomorrow’s history lessons written in the real voice of today.
Tickets and Donations
Luncheon tickets are available from a link in the new GAP website GreenbeltArchive.org or directly from our ticketing site (CLICK HERE), and an online and on-the-day silent auction aims to part guests and online visitors almost painlessly from their money. Donations unrelated to the auction are also welcome.
Attendees will be provided with free loaner pens but should bring their own checkbooks.