Five years ahead of the bicentenary of the Sydney Morning Herald, staff at the paper are working to complete a single online collection of its, and other Nine Entertainment media archives.
The masthead celebrated its 195th birthday at the weekend, when a report detailed the five-year project to digitise its 11 million photos.
A collection of 13,000 photographic glass plate negatives from the early 1900s to the 1930s was given to the National Library of Australia in 2012 by then publisher of the Herald Fairfax Media, and subsequently digitised (see GXpress report).
Currently, staff including photo specialist Harry Hollinsworth (pictured) are working through the 11 million photos at a climate-controlled facility in western Sydney.
A report quoted Nine chief executive Matt Stanton that there was “intrinsic value” for Nine in protecting the images for the future. “The history of Australia, its democracy and its success as a nation is deeply interwoven with our media.
“Digitising these records protects this history and enables future generations to explore our rich stories of Australia, serving as a reminder of the importance of local media and homegrown journalism for many years to come.”
Project director Stephanie Foran says the aim is bring the 200 years of video, film, photojournalism and articles into a single and searchable archive. “We are digitising Australian history as told by our reporters, photographers and television broadcasts across every masthead and broadcast channel,” she said.
This includes millions of photos and negatives in various formats, and large sections of the Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review – including 500,000 pages of microfilm from 1951-2000 – and other mastheads. Among these is The Sun, which began life as Hugh Denison’s Sunday Sun in 1903, and was acquired by Fairfax in 1953. The Sunday paper was merged with the Sunday Herald that year (to become the Sun-Herald) – remaining as the sponsor of City to Surf race – and the daily edition ceased in 1988.
Plans are to also include 150,000 hours of broadcast TV, “ranging from The Graham Kennedy Show and Nine News to A Current Affair and 60 Minutes”. Vision comes in a variety of formats including film and videotape – in one and two-inch, U-matic and Betacam formats – as well as printed photos and hard copy articles, and materials stored on CD, DVD, microfiche and microfilm.
Copies of the Herald from 1831-1955 have already been digitised as part of the National Library’s Trove, and Foran says some photos have disappeared while others have been sold. This Sun picture of a koala-hugging Maureen O’Hara (top) is the only surviving photo from a shoot of the Irish-American actress visiting Taronga Park Zoo in 1950 that could be digitised. Others have been destroyed by “vinegar syndrome”, which threatened masses of large format acetate images taken from 1950-57, and “smells as bad as it sounds”.
Another problem is “sticky shed syndrome”, requiring legacy magnetic tapes in which moisture has made the binder gummy, needing to be baked like a cake for a final successful playback.
Hollinsworth says negatives most at risk of crumbling have been scanned, but “it is a bit like painting the Harbour Bridge: once you think you are finished, you have to go back to the beginning again”.
Also pictured: Herald editor Jordan Baker looks at old editions in the Fairfax archives (photo: Fairfax/Steven Siewert); and Harry Hollinsworth at the Fairfax archives warehouse (photo Fairfax/Louise Kennerley).