From Index Cards to SQLite

Liberating a Century of Cincinnati News with Datasette

Ray Voelker
Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library
ray.voelker@chpl.org

Chalmers Hadley

"News reports of major local happenings would be matters of history some day and that the proper indexing of such items in time would be valuable"

— Chalmers Hadley, Head Librarian, CHPL (1927)

Librarians hand-typed index cards for newspaper articles
Each card: title, newspaper, date, page, column, subject
Coverage: Enquirer, Post, Herald, Cincinnati Magazine, and more
Selected coverage reaching back to the early 1800s

Newsdex card catalog at CHPL

Newsdex Goes Digital — Then Gets Stuck

March 1992: card catalog computerized as "Newsdex" in Millennium ILS
~1.8 million MARC records of newspaper citations
CHPL migrated to Sierra — but Newsdex stayed on old Millennium server
Maintaining a legacy ILS alongside Sierra: costly and fragile
Goal: preserve the data, decommission Millennium

The Data: MARC → Something Useful

MARC Record


245    $a Chart shows rapid rise
       of river: Comparison of
       present flood with
       previous high stages
260    $c 1937
650    $a Floods
650    $a Floods (1937)
650    $a Floods (1913)
650    $a Floods (1884)
773    $a Cincinnati Enquirer
       $g 01/27/1937 6:1 pic

What a human wants


Title:     Chart shows rapid rise
           of river...
Newspaper: Cincinnati Enquirer
Date:      1937-01-27
Page:      6
Column:    1
Image:     Yes
Subjects:  Floods; Floods (1937);
           Floods (1913);
           Floods (1884)

The Pipeline


Millennium ILS → MARC Export (.mrc)
    ↓
pymarc + sqlite-utils (Python)
    ↓
SQLite Database
    ↓
Datasette → newsdex.chpl.org

github.com/cincinnatilibrary/newsdex

A Century of Cincinnati News, Explorable

Resources

Thank You!

Thank you to the Genealogy & Local History Department — they created this data over nearly 100 years.

Ray Voelker
ray.voelker@gmail.com | ray.voelker@chpl.org
github.com/rayvoelker