Archives of The Exonian's 139 Volumes Made Available Online
Since April 6, 1878, The Exonian has been an invaluable resource for students and faculty alike. However, these newspapers have remained largely inaccessible to the majority of the student body, and are kept under lock and key in the Academy archives. This all changed on September 18, however, when The Exonian unveiled the Exonian archives—an online, digitized archive containing all 6,627 Exonian issues ever published.
According to Peter Nelson, the Head of Archives and Special Collections, the mission to digitize the Exonian archives has been ongoing for several years. “My predecessor, Edward Desrochers was interested in digitization of a variety of the Academy's publications, and The Exonian was almost number one on the list,” he said. “We thought it would be fun for alumni, and interesting for students to see what The Exonian looked like ten, fifty, a hundred years ago. So that's really how it started, gradual interest grew, and we just tried to find a way to make it happen.”
The process of compiling the Exonian archives was not without obstacles. Nelson explained that because the original newspapers were too fragile, they could not be scanned, limiting their ability to use certain methods of scanning the papers. Although the most recent articles were easily uploaded because they were saved digitally by the Exonian editors, the previous issues had to be scanned using microfilm. Because the microfilm was tricky to work with, it was a challenge finding a vendor who was skilled in microfilm techniques. However, once a vendor was found, they were able to digitize the papers in high resolution.
One technique used was Optical Character Recognition, which transcribed the newspaper text as digital type. Nelson described the intricacies of the process, explaining that Optical Character Recognition was a technique that required a lot of quality control. "If an advertisement, say, appears in The Exonian for 1891, it might have a weird font that has a lot of curlicues and elaborate filigrees, and things like that are just not readable by a computer," he said.
However, the vendor was able to transcribe the text to approximately 97 percent accuracy, leaving only a small margin for error. For the remaining inaccurate texts, Nelson hopes that retired faculty, alumni, or other people looking for fun things to do will contribute to correcting the texts. "I could just see them just sitting down, you know, on a Sunday morning, and going through some of these articles as a volunteer, to help improve The Exonian," he said. However, lower Francisco Silva expressed his concerns about the openness of the editing. "It's kind of like Wikipedia, because you can change it and alter it and it could possibly be wrong if someone changes it like that," he said.
Many agree that the value of the archives outweighs the obstacles that Nelson and his team had to overcome to digitize the archives. According to Nelson, the archives will help us understand the student perspective—the Exonian being a student-run newspaper, it will always have a student slant on the stories written about. Nelson added, "It's just another portal into understanding the student point of view from whatever era."
By studying the issues of The Exonian from different periods in time, trends in student viewpoints can be observed. One thing in particular that Nelson noted was that the attitude toward faculty had changed. "In the 1800s, there was a lot of fear as well as respect of the faculty," Nelson said. He compared this to the current day, observing that "nowadays, it’s a little bit more investigatory. The visitation policy and things like that, and investments that the Academy makes in its endowment, things like that have been looked at with a more critical eye than they ever would’ve been in the past.” He demonstrated that studying the Exonian archives could show how changing times have led to a more open criticism towards the faculty and administration.
Nelson also hopes that the improved accessibility of these articles will prove useful to those conducting historical research on the Academy. "I think historical research for students doing papers about the history of the Academy, you know, issues like coeducation, or foreign students, or financial aid, things like that—all those topics have suddenly just really immeasurably improved as far as access," Nelson said.
According to Nelson, the possible benefits of the archives reach beyond research and academics, and highlighted that the archives could also be viewed as a source of enjoyable reminiscing. He said that he hoped to see alumni going back to look through the issues that were published during their time at the Academy and reminisce about the experiences they had. However, lower Lilly Pinciaro doubted that current Exonians would use the archives for anything other than academic reasons. "Given the schedule at Exeter and how little time that I have, quite honestly I probably wouldn't use the archives for recreation or leisure," she said. However, Pinciaro agreed on the value of the archives, saying, "I think it's important to preserve this kind of thing even if not too many people use it." Lower Francisco Silva agreed with Pinciaro's sentiment, and added, "I think we should know what came before us just to have appreciation of what we have now and what builds our school now."