By Kirsten Johnson -

In the next few years, 54 years of the bilingual North American Post or “Hokubei Hochi newspaper,” will be digitized, with keyword-searchable metadata available to access at UW libraries.

“The history of the entire Japanese American community is tied up with the newspaper and we want the world to be able to access the information,” said Elaine Ikoma Ko, executive director of the foundation and 1975 alumna of the Department of Communication. “This will make it so much more accessible to the public domain.”

The effort, called the Nikkei Newspaper Digital Archive Project, is one of the first of its kind. It’s being sponsored by the nonprofit organization, the Hokubei Hochi Foundation, named after the publication. The foundation exists to support preservation of the newspaper and other charitable projects.

The end result of the effort will be entirely digital issues of the English and Japanese publication from the years 1946 to 2000. Currently, past issues are only available in print and on microfilm.

Pre-World War II, the paper was known as the North American Times and ceased publication when the war broke out and many Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps. After the war in 1946, the North American Post was born.

Ko’s grandfather, Sadahiko Ikomo, was publisher of the paper at that time in 1946. He and his family, including Ko’s mother, were interned at Minidoka internment camp in Idaho during the war. While Ko has never spoken to her grandfather as he returned to Japan when she was very young, she’s been drawn to learn more about him through archived issues of the publication.

“I have a natural affinity for the newspaper because of my grandfather’s involvement,” she said.

She’s primarily interested in “legacy” work, which is what drew her to start the foundation. She was part of early conversations to begin the digitization project in September 2011.  Currently, due to financial constraints and time limitations, the foundation is focusing on post-war years. But, eventually, they’d like to return to digitizing older issues of the paper.

Funding for the project is provided by the nonprofit group 4Culture, a King County cultural services agency. The UW library system is providing funding for all of the microfilms. When collaborating, Ikoma Ko said the foundation discussed various ways to go about the project but ultimately settled on partnering with UW, which has past issues of the publication microfilmed already.

“There’s no better institution,” she said. “I can’t think of a better one in this area. They just have a lot of resources and it’s just been a wonderful partnership. They have really expressed a lot of interest in this project.”

Glenda Pearson, head of Microfilm & Newspaper Collections at UW said the library collections have thousands of Washington state publications available on microfilm, but the Nikkei Project is the first of its kind to digitize over five decades of a publication’s history.

“It’s sort of groundbreaking,” she said. “It’s really the first of its kind to do this.”

Pearson said digitizing publications is a preservation measure that she thinks will become more common in the future. The biggest road block she said is finding the money and resources to do so.

“People are under the impression that everything is online now, but it’s not,” she said. “Doing something like this is very labor intensive.”

The first step in the project involves creating a metadata library with categories including people, historical buildings and events. Metadata refers to a brief, written description of content on each page.

The next step is creating fresh copies of microfilm from older copies, that might be aging or have scratches. Then, student employees will begin the process of scanning the new microfilm copies into clean, digital pages.

To test things out, Ikoma Ko and volunteers are focusing on digitizing issues from just the year 1946, about 130 pages of publication. They’re hoping to display those early results as a way to potentially get more community members on board and find more sources of funding.

Currently, the project is in the stages of replacing dated microfilms with fresh copies. In all, around 90 reels of microfilm are being used. Ikoma Ko also hopes that this metadata, keyword-searchable feature will serve as an example for other papers.

“It’s just going to be a great model that this can be done in a way that can be efficient and not overly done,” she said. “We’re pretty excited about the project.”