Digitizing The Fredonia Censor

During this past year Joan Shumaker of the Nunda Historical Society, which is near Letchworth State Park, shared this very unusual website with me www.fultonhistory.com This site provides access to many New York State newspapers, historic NYS documents, photographs, and post cards to assist with your research and genealogy projects. Surprisingly, there are many small newspapers included with those of our major cities. Joan realized Tom Tryniski, webmaster of the site, was seeking newspapers to add to the collection. The Nunda Historical Society had their newspaper collection digitized and so I decided to follow a good lead and set about getting The Fredonia Censor digitized. I contacted him and agreed to send just a couple of our reels of microfilm to him for a start. Once he received the reels and tried them out he determined they were to badly worn from use to make them searchable. I had to find microfilm reels that were good enough to create digital documents from and thankfully Sue Wilkes, Head of Circulations, at SUNY Fredonia’s Reed Library was willing to loan me the reels from the college. Every week or so I went to the college to borrow about 10 reels and mailed them on to Tom Tryniski which he scanned and returned to me. Once the entire collection of The Fredonia Censor was scanned by Tom he sent a hard drive to me which I transferred to our own hard drive. These files are pdf files which were OCR’d (word recognized),
with an index to make them searchable. Tom also puts these newspapers into his online data base and we can direct researchers by linking our website: www.barkermuseum.net with www.funtonhistory.com . Having The Fredonia Censor on-line and searchable is most valuable to researchers who are not in the Fredonia area. For those of us in the area, having searchable pdf files of The Fredonia Censor on computers at the Museum and possibly at the college since Jeremy Linden, Archivist of Reed Library's Special Collections expressed interest in gaining a copy, is truly a great convenience. The total cost for this project was the cost of sending the film and purchasing the hard drive. Myself and Joan Shumaker are encouraging other organizations to make their newspaper archives more accessible by taking advantage of the service Tom Tryniski so generously and expertly provides. Tom’s contact information is, E-mail: tryniski@fultonhistory.com or Phone: 315-402-2327