A project to digitise more than 130 years of local history immortalised in the pages of the Herald – and make it free to access for the public online – is set to take off in 2023 after a frenzy of activity behind the scenes by a dedicated band of volunteers over the past 12 months.

The Herald Digital Archive Project was first launched in November 2019 and quickly attracted a flurry of support from potential volunteers, local history groups and other organisations. Unfortunately the pandemic stalled the project’s roll-out.

But at the beginning of 2022, a steering group was formed – comprising chairman Lesley Bunting, a retired senior leader at FTSE100 publishing giant Pearson PLC; technical consultant Hilary Roberts, the senior curator of photographs at the Imperial War Museum; and Peeps in the Past author Chris Shepheard. Herald head of content Daniel Gee also joined the steering group as a Tindle Newspapers Ltd sponsor in August.

With the help of volunteers over the past year, some 80 per cent of the Herald’s physical paper archives – totalling some 785 volumes of newsprint – have now been inventoried, while an astonishing 99,000 photo negatives have been indexed.

As a result, the archive project has now moved from its ‘initiation’ into the detailed ‘planning’ phase, and an initial meeting was held with the British Library in November to discuss options for digitising the Herald volumes. It is hoped fundraising will begin in early 2023 once options and costs for the Herald digitisation have been assessed.

Herald Digital Archive Project chairman Lesley Bunting said: “This project is about making sure all the heritage contained in the pages of the Herald over the past 130 years is available, free at the point of use for the community going forward, and making sure the fragile original media is preserved.”

Although the project was launched before the pandemic, during the Covid lockdowns the Herald experienced a huge upsurge in archive requests – heightening the need to digitise its archives.

Lesley added: “We know there is a great interest in local history because of the volume of enquiries for items in the Herald archives, and engaging the community is a really important part of this project.

“We want to make sure people can easily search the Herald archive for what they need and download what they need, without having to flick through page after page of newsprint or microfilm.”

The project is faced with two options. One is to commission a company to scan the newsprint and microfilms on its behalf, while another is to buy specialist scanning equipment and do the work itself. Both will need considerable funding, with community fundraising and grant applications likely to be launched in the new year.

Whichever option is chosen, the software used to scan in the news pages will convert the images into PDF files which, by using optical character recognition technology, will then be made searchable. This means, in theory, anybody searching for a particular article will be able to type in certain keywords – for example “Harold Falkner” or “Farnham Castle” – and be shown all relevant results dating back 130 years.

Technical consultant Hilary Roberts said: “The problem with a physical archive is you are constantly walking a tightrope between access and conservation. The more people use it, the more fragile things become.

“But newspaper archives are absolutely invaluable in terms of not only a local resource, but also a national resource. In terms of getting the broader community interested in what Farnham has achieved over the past century and a half, this project is really, really important.

“What you tend to find with these types of projects is that all sorts of new community projects will come out of having the archives available.

“In recent years, the Herald archive has been surprisingly heavily used by people who are writing books, and there’s a lot of family history going on too. But you can also see a lot of potential other uses that, at the moment, perhaps aren’t really using the archive to their advantage.”

Lesley added: “But we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we are going to engage with people who have done this before – like the British Newspaper Library and other papers that have already archived their paper volumes – and make sure whatever we spend money on is sensible.”

The Herald’s own physical archive dates back to the early 1930s. But the Museum of Farnham is also involved, and with the help of its microfilms dating back to the first-ever edition of the Herald in 1892, the project should be able to digitise a complete archive of the Herald and its various editions – covering Farnham, Alton, Haslemere, Bordon, Liphook, Petersfield and, for a short period, Hook.

Chris Shepheard, Peeps into the Past author, said: “We want to make sure that when somebody buys a subscription to the Herald, they can not only search the current papers, they can go right back to 1892 – and that they won’t have to pay for the earlier years. That facility should be the standard.”

A core of around seven volunteers have undertaken the bulk of the archiving and indexing work to date – but a total of around 25 volunteers are on stand-by, many of whom responded to the initial call for help in 2020.

However, more help will likely be needed as the project scales up over the coming year.

Chris continued: “While we couldn’t start the project as a whole during the pandemic, the enquiries were still coming in – and as a result of that, we indexed a lot of photographs. This is the more unusual part of the project, and it’s a bit that will come on later.

“But we’ve actually got the negatives of about 90 per cent of the photographs that appeared in the Herald from 1950 onwards, and we’ve digitised the index of these already, which gives us an indication of where the stories were. And that was with a team of volunteers working from home, doing the transcription.”

Hilary added: “The photographs are really interesting, because they give an insight into a vanished way of life. Not only the achievements of individuals, but things like the hop trade and blacksmiths and so on.

“There were all sorts of craftsmen working in and around Farnham who were photographed beautifully in black and white, and many of the photographs are really superb quality.”

She continued: “It is a sad truth that many newspapers across the country have got rid of their archives, that people thought at different points in time that nobody would ever be interested in this stuff. It was taking up space, so they just got rid of it.

“But this is not just about local interest. Although that’s at the core, there are many people who have a real interest in how local newspaper archives give an insight into the national history. And that’s really important. Very few people know about Farnham’s claim to the origin of the first two-minute silence in the First World War, for example.”

Work is continuing to complete an inventory of the Herald archive – “to quantify the amount of material that has to be dealt with”, as Chris says – after which quotes can be sought from organisations such as the British Library to undertake the digital archiving, store the material and finally to make it accessible to the public.

Chris continued: “We know the project will involve more volunteers as we go forward, but it’s how we involve them that is the question. So far there has been a lot of planning and the volunteering opportunities have been fairly limited.

“But depending on which option we choose, it may be the case that volunteers actually sit down and do the scanning, or that they deliver the papers to a commercial scanner, or it could be that we work with the British Library, digitising the volumes they have in their own archives.

“But there’s still going to be a lot of work for volunteers – especially compiling the indexes.”

Lesley added: “We really want that community interest and community engagement, but we have to stress this is at a very early stage. We want people to be aware of the project, and that although we may not need their support right now, we will need it a bit further down the track when we understand what we really need people to do.

“This isn’t going to happen in three months. It’s a longer-term activity. We don’t want to set the expectation upfront that people will have access to the archive really quickly, because we don’t yet know how long it’s going to take.”

Hilary said: “Much further down the road, there will be potential for public projects in and around the town, which could involve every generation – but we’re nowhere near that yet. The aim is to get the archive to a point where those projects are possible.

“There are a lot of institutions who are in Farnham who could either gauge or benefit from this and hopefully, there will be the potential to build those relationships.”

Anyone interested in volunteering for the Herald Digital Archive Project is encouraged to email the team at [email protected]