NATCHEZ &8212; A $11,000 grant to the Natchez-Adams Wilkinson Library Service will provide equipment for digitizing newspapers in the historical collection held at the Judge George Armstrong Library.

The library service, with headquarters at the Natchez facility, serves two smaller libraries in Wilkinson County.

&8220;We&8217;ve been discussing this for a long time,&8221; said Susan Cassagne, director of the libraries. The Mississippi Library Commission awarded the grant.

Transferring the newspapers from microfilm to digital form will be time consuming and tedious, Cassagne said. But it will enhance the massive collection of information found in the newspapers, which date back to the early 1800s.

First, the new equipment will make photo images of the newspaper pages. Then, with optical character recognition software, the images will be changed into documents.

&8220;Then a researcher can type in a key word and find all the references,&8221; Cassagne said.

A big step now is figuring out who will spend the time it takes to make the transfers.

&8220;We&8217;ll either rely on volunteers or on other grant funds that will let us hire a person to work on this,&8221; Cassagne said. &8220;We&8217;d prefer to have a person paid through a grant who would be dedicated only to that project.&8221;

The first newspapers to be digitized will be Natchez Democrat issues between 1916 and 1923, chosen because of copyright constraints on later issues.

The newspaper project will be huge because the library&8217;s collection is massive. But the time researchers save will make the task well worth the efforts, Cassagne said.

Next, she would like to digitize some of the materials in the Natchez Room, a room that is not accessible to library patrons.

&8220;We have historical documents in the locked room that could be very useful to researchers, but they are so delicate that they are not able to be used,&8221; she said. &8220;We really have a treasure trove here.&8221;

Casey Hughes, administrative assistant at the library, wrote the grant.