First Posted: 12/12/2014
HUGHESTOWN — Preserving the past has been the Greater Pittston Historical Society’s mission all along. Now, the organization is taking that preservation process to the Sunday Dispatch.
Joe Bohan, a member of the GPHS, has been working tirelessly at the Dispatch headquarters on New Street in Hughestown. He began the process of photographing each page the Dispatch has ever produced. When it’s all said and done, 67 years will be archived. That’s around 3,500 copies of the paper. So far, Bohan gets about one year done each day.
Thanks to the historical member Mike Lizonitz, a homemade scanning system was built. Once the pages are photographed, the group uploads them to a computer program. The hope is that all of the archives will be search-able.
Two Canon point-and-shoot cameras are positioned on top of the system. As Bohan lowers them, a Plexiglas plate is dropped on the paper, flattening it out. With the click of a foot pedal, both cameras activate and focus, eventually revealing photos of each page.
Bohan has been at the Dispatch for the past two weeks, just about every day. He’s gotten through about six years of the Dispatch. The hardest part, he says, is dealing with the old papers’ condition. Some of them are falling apart and folded over.
“It’s tough to get them all straight,” he said. “That’s the hardest part. You hate to miss something, but this system is ideal for what we’re doing.”
– Compiled by Nick Wagner
