Laura Motley is the Digital Project Technician and has been working on Rhode Island’s National Digital Newspaper Program since the first grant cycle, joining the team in March 2020. Since then, some of her favorite finds within the titles are old weather reports and hand drawn advertisements. Laura takes part in every stage of the project’s digitization process: collating, scanning, writing metadata, OCR, page sequence, issue denotation, and file validation. In addition to the processing workflow, she is responsible for training staff, quality checks, troubleshooting, and updating the manual. When not working on NDNP, Laura works on other digitization projects at the library, frequently using a flatbed scanner and a copy stand for oversized materials. Laura enjoys giving archival materials a digital life and making them easily accessible for researchers, artists, and lifelong learners.
Audrey Buhain joined the project in September 2023 as the Digital Projects Assistant. Her responsibilities in the NDNP workflow include microfilm collation, scanning, digitization, and optical character recognition (OCR). You can learn more about the different stages of newspaper digitization from microfilm in upcoming posts focused on the NDNP workflow! Audrey is also the Reading Room Attendant at Providence Public Library’s Special Collections, and she values the intersection of these two roles in facilitating public access to historic materials, as well as in increasing her own awareness of the different social plagues that the historic newspapers are always trying to warn her about.
Rhode Island Digital Newspaper Project 