Why Ledger-Star Archive matters
Newspapers are the living record of communities. They capture the small human details that never make it into history books — the daily commerce, births and deaths, community organization notices, letters, and the cadence of local life. Ledger-Star Archive exists to preserve those pages and make them discoverable: scanning fragile paper, improving OCR, tagging names and places and presenting the results in a research-friendly interface.
Built for discovery, not just browsing
Our approach balances automated processing with human curation. Large-scale OCR gets us most of the way there — converting scanned images to searchable text — but we layer verification, community corrections and contextual metadata that improves retrieval. Instead of a raw keyword dump, Ledger-Star surfaces context: was the phrase a headline, a classifieds entry, a sports box score, or a legal notice? That context helps you interpret results and avoid false positives.
A research workflow
Start with a search, refine with filters by year, newspaper, article type and geographic region, then save the set as a named query. Each result links to a high-res page viewer with zoom, page-text highlights and annotations. Researchers can build collections (dossiers), export bibliographic citations in common formats (APA, MLA, Chicago) and download image clips for presentations with clear attribution. Everything you export carries a persistent URL so collaborators see the exact page and zoom level that you referenced.
Community & collaborations
Ledger-Star partners with local historical societies, university libraries, and volunteer transcribers. We offer tools for institutions to contribute whole runs or individual supplements, and for volunteers to verify OCR and tag entries. Those collaborative corrections become part of the public index and improve search quality for everyone.
How we source material
Our acquisitions combine licensed newspaper microfilm, donations from archives, and public-domain content. Each incoming batch is inspected, scanned at high DPI, then processed through a pipeline of image enhancement, OCR, metadata extraction, and manual quality checks. We maintain provenance metadata for every page — where it came from, which physical reel or volume, and catalog references for archival citation.
Privacy & ethics
We recognize that historic newspapers contain sensitive personal information. Ledger-Star maintains fairness and sensitivity guidelines: subjects of contemporary privacy concern are handled with care, and we provide mechanisms for institutions to request takedown of nonpublic materials. Our public facing index focuses on usability and research value but remains responsive to legitimate privacy and ethical requests.