The Shakerite has kept a mostly complete archive of past print issues in our newsroom at the high school, going back to 1951. The Shaker Heights Public Library also keeps an archive, which goes all the way back to 1929.
The 1929-1930 issues call themselves “Volume IV,” implying that this was the fourth school year that The Shakerite was in print. However, text in these issues implies that it was actually the first year of the paper. The May 29, 1930 issue states, “With this issue, the Shakerite’s first year comes to a close. Not a triumphal close, perhaps, but the end of a year of experience gained and the roots of a permanent Shaker institution firmly planted.”
In spite of this, I still mark the starting year of The Shakerite as unknown.
Until today, this archive had not been digitized, largely due to the time commitment that would be required to do so. Until recent advances in technology, creating a digital archive would also be prohibitably expensive.
I picked up this project as my Senior Project, as I am deeply passionate about preserving history, and really enjoy this sort of work. I’d quickly learn that I was far from the first person to attempt to do this, or determine how to do this, as a Senior Project, but past attempts had been largely incomplete, usually due to past technical limitations.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to start from scratch. For Senior Project, Sarah Grube (’18), who worked as a copy editor for The Shakerite, researched and wrote a thorough cost analysis report for digitizing and hosting the archive using technology and services available at the time. She also organized and updated our collection, then created a complete list of the issues in both the high school and library archives, which saved me a lot of time.
The first hurdle to be overcome was how to scan each print issue. A typical at-home scanner would not suffice because newspaper pages are too large to fit. In past attempts, the only practical approach was to use a large flatbed scanner. While the Shaker Public Library has such a scanner, it is quite slow, which would make scanning well more than 700 issues in a month impossible.
The winning method ended up being the document scanning function built in to the Files app on every modern iPhone. While imperfect, it enabled every issue to be scanned in remarkable quality in less than a month of work.
While The Shakerite moved to computer-aided production in the 1980s, we only have archives of the original source files going back to 2005. Even then, this archive is spotty. The PDFs for most 2005-2011 issues had to be recovered from a failing external hard drive, and PDFs for most issues from 2012-2014 were lost due to an unfortunate incident when someone dropped the hard drive that they were stored on.
Once scanned, each issue was uploaded to the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to archiving just about anything you could think of. They are perhaps best known for the WayBack Machine, a more than 70 petabyte archive of web pages (one petabyte is equal to 1024 terabytes!).
The Internet Archive interface allows for searching by text contents across the entire collection of Shakerite issues. To do so, go to this link, which includes a search filter that only returns results from The Shakerite. Then, select “search text contents” and enter your query in the search box, making sure to leave the filter in place.
The Shakerite will continue to update the archive with new print issues as they are published. If you have any physical copies of The Shakerite that are missing from the archive, please reach out to us via email. You can see a full list of missing issues in the project spreadsheet.
