Purdue University Archives and Special Collections supports the discovery, learning, and engagement goals of Purdue University by identifying, collecting, preserving, and making available for research records and papers of enduring value.

In March 2020, most staff and student employees within Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies transitioned to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A majority of the student employees in LSIS work with physical materials and assist with day-to-day operational tasks. And so, the move to remote work created a conundrum: how can LSIS continue to employ our valued student employees during a time that on-site operations are no longer available? Purdue University Archives and Special Collections offered a solution.

As part of its mission to preserve and make accessible the history of Purdue University, Archives and Special Collections and Libraries and School of Information Studies previously digitized and placed online issues of the student newspaper, the Purdue Exponent. Issues are available at https://exponent.lib.purdue.edu. Available issues are no longer under copyright and are therefore in the public domain. The newspaper, which began in 1889, provides insights into the news, events, and even advertisements of their era. Placing the Exponent online included digitization of print issue and creation of computer-generated text for each article. This text allows visitors to the site to keyword search available issues. While the generated text was correct well over 97% of the time, slight errors in the text did occur. These errors sometimes impact search results. As such, text reviews and updates improve primary source research and scholarly activity.

Let’s return to March of this year. Archives and Special Collections proposed a solution to keep our LSIS student employees working and improve the digitized Exponent. Students would transition to the role of text correction experts, reviewing and editing text as errors were located. The proposal was accepted, and soon students were contributing improvements to the text. This endeavor benefitted the students by continuing their employment and providing a unique opportunity learn more about Purdue. The work also benefitted Archives and Special Collections by improving the online Exponent text, and thereby aiding researchers and the worldwide Purdue University community.

How to Correct Text

The text enhancement work involves registering a free user account. Once registered, LSIS students were asked to sign up for a year and month of the newspaper. Instructions and guidance were provided by archivists within Archives and Special Collections.

Examples

Here a list of Exponent newspaper editors in 1896. The left side of the screen, or text block, is the place where text may be corrected. Note that in some cases letters are in place of numbers and in other cases the connections between groups are hard to understand.

In other cases, symbols, line spacing, and ink dots created mistakes in the transcript. This block of text from 1916 illustrates the need for text correction. The text block on the left shows the highlighted article before and after correction.

Outcomes

Between late March and mid-summer, nearly 60 people worked as part of the Exponent project. Here are the final numbers:

Text blocks corrected: 73,531

Articles completely corrected: 23,957

Pages completely corrected: 8,235

Issues completely corrected: 341

Archives and Special Collections is thankful to everyone who worked on the Exponent project during a time of immense change. These contributions provide lasting research assistance. Future researchers, from families seeking more information about a relative, to scholars studying past events, to Purdue students using the newspaper for their own research will benefit from the 2020 Exponent project. Archives and Special Collections is also proud to have been able to help our LSIS student employees keep working during an uncertain time.