Published: April 04, 2008 04:37 pm            

Fairview is scanning our history

New technology at public library offering patrons a special ‘link’ to their shared past

FAIRVIEW — There are all kinds of different ways to view history. With the advancements of television and recordable devices, in the next 150 years people could be able to see what we were doing today by going down to the local Wal-Mart space-station superstore and buying a pint-sized Blue Ray DVD of Bill O’ Reilly commenting on the status of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Our ability to view history before the advent of television won’t be quite as easy, though. Newspapers were our major link to the events of days prior to the television, and it really wasn’t until the mid to late 19th century that people actually were able to begin to preserve these periodicals.

Then came the creation of microfilm. People could simply store and preserve information from periodicals on film slides, but the ability to view the microfilm on microfilm machines was somewhat tedious.

Now, a new technology called the Novatec ScanPro 1000 has made access to old periodicals more accessible, and the Fairview City Library, in Fairview, is using this technology to give residents all over Oklahoma a chance to view the history of Oklahoma with ease.

“We’re pretty proud of our genealogy back there,” Ernestine Titus, director of the Fairview City Library, said. “We’ve been told we have one of the best in the state, even from people from other states.”

The ScanPro 1000 utilizes cutting-edge digital technologies to form an exceptionally compact microfilm viewer, scanner and printer that takes up about as much room on the desktop as two sheets of letter paper. The microfilm viewer has a featured optical 7-times to 54-times zoom lens that never has to be changed out. It offers automatic focus, exposure control and optical image rotation for quicker and more efficient research and handles all film types, including microfiche, aperture card and micro opaques, in addition to microfilm.

“It has its own printer, and it operates on wireless, so we did not have to worry about Internet connection,” Titus said. “We are even thinking about getting a wireless keyboard.”

Library patrons in Fairview can look at periodicals dating back to 1905 to see how history has evolved and unraveled in rural Oklahoma. Titus said there are newspapers from all over Major County and its surrounding areas available for viewing, including Ames, Homestead and Cleo. Many of these towns no longer have newspapers. Patrons can find old school district information, family obituaries and advertisements through a click of the mouse on a 24-inch swiveling monitor.

“It will swivel around, because a lot of things like census records are on ledgers, so you want it to where it reads horizontally,” Titus said. “There’s also all these little icons at the bottom of the screen. We tried to put everything on there that we thought the patrons might need to keep them from getting confused.”

The new technology came to the library after they decided to replace their old microfilm reader. Neil Kleinecke from the Novatec Corporation contacted Titus, and she went to the Oklahoma Library Association Convention in 2007 to speak to him about it. After further correspondence with Kleinecke, Titus was able to secure funds from Oklahoma Legislative state aid, because the Fairview city budget could not afford it as an expenditure. The ScanPro 1000 arrived at the library in late February, 2008.

“That’s one of the things that state aid is for,” Titus said. “It is there to help libraries get things they could not otherwise afford.”

The library is able to obtain older newspapers from all over northwestern Oklahoma on microfilm from the Oklahoma Historical Society. This has attracted families throughout Oklahoma to the library. Titus said many of them like to check on their family history or events that may have happened on the day they were born. She has, at times, found herself back on the ScanPro looking for some history.

“I could sit back here for hours looking up something,” she said.

Because the technology is so new to the library, library staff have not yet been able to completely master all of its options, said Titus, but there is a handbook available for the viewer. Library staff have not obtained a handbook yet, she said. However, she stressed, the machine is very easy to operate, and all of the icons on screen are self-explanatory.

Titus expects they will see more people coming in to use the ScanPro 1000 in the coming summer months. Right now, though, she is just pleased to have something this state-of-the-art inside her library as an education tool and link to the history of Oklahoma.

“This will make it more convenient for patrons to look up research with more ease and less frustration,” Titus said. “I’m excited about it, because I know it’s going to bring a lot more people in. It’s like one of our board members said, we don’t want to keep up with the Joneses, we want to be the Joneses.”