BOERNE - The history of Boerne, as recorded in the pages of The Boerne Star, is becoming more readily available online thanks to grants awarded to the Patrick Heath Public Library.
Kelly Skovbjerg, Heath Library director, Monday explained the series of grants the library has obtained that have allowed it to digitize decades of the newspaper’s past.
Skovbjerg is working on a third grant, through the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) “TexTreasures” grant. On Monday, she hauled away copies of The Boerne Star from 1994-2011 that she will take to the University of North Texas next week.
“We’ll take them to the Willis Library at UNT, where they have the Texas Digitial Newpaper Program,” Skovbjerg said. “They start processing on their scanners. These grants run for about one year, so they have a very precise process.”
This is the third library grant used to preserve the news, and the city’s history, through The Star. Skovbjerg landed the first in 2016, a $10,450 grant through The Hancher Foundation that began the process. That grant allowed Skovbjerg, The Star and UNT to digitize back issues from m 1940-1965.
A second grant – the first of two TexTreasure grants through TSLAC – for $25,000 was awarded last year and continued the process, picking up where The Hancher grant left off, with the 1966 editions of the newspaper through 1993.
The copies Skovbjerg will deliver to UNT next week are being digitized through a $38,717 TexTreasure grant.
Skovbjerg is excited about capturing the newspaper’s account of the city’s history.
“Since I first started, which was 21 years ago, I’ve been wanting to have this done for a long time,” she said. “The benefit to the Star and the library is, we’re able to send people information a lot faster. They don’t have to come into either building to find information.”
She said library patrons seeking access to city history or back issues of the newspaper “would have to make an appointment with the Boerne Star to come in and look at the bound version. We kept only six months of The Star in print.”
Skovbjerg said patrons or history buffs can now log on from home and scan the news, instead of making a trip to the library or spending hours in The Star’s “morgue,” its room of back issues.
“It helps us to provide a service a lot faster for people who want to find information about Boerne. People can access it any time they want, which is a huge benefit,” she said. “Since they’ve been loaded, they’ve had 55,192 uses.”
She expects to have the 1994-2011 editions up within a year.
Boerne Star Managing Editor Zach Wright said the newspapers and articles “are very searchable. You can search by word, or by organization. Select ‘The Boerne Star’ and it will find them for you.
“It’s really great to be able to direct people. People would spend hours and hours in there (the morgue),” he added.
Physical disasters have plagued The Boerne Star’s morgue in years past, including a fire that consumed the newspaper’s 1906-1939 editions.
“I think the benefit (of the digitizing process) is ensuring we don’t lose another 30 or 60 years of history,” Wright added.
Consumers can log on at “Portal To Texas History” or go to Texashistory.unt. edu to access the digital editions.
Comment
Comments