Pilot Database Now Online/Searchable, U. of Kentucky Libraries Uses "Hybrid" Approach to Preserve Historic Horse Racing Newspapers
Keeneland, one of America's most famous horse racing tracks (they're also known horse sales), located in Lexington, Kentucky, has partnered with the University of Kentucky Libraries to preserve Keeneland's collection of the Daily Racing Form (DRF, a horse racing newspaper). The collection was donated in 2000 and includes just about every edition of the DRF, about eleven million pages.
In 2007, Keeneland Library approached UK Libraries to design a preservation plan for Keeneland's 3,500 volume archive of the Daily Racing Form and its former publication, The Morning Telegraph. Through funding from Keeneland and research by UK Libraries, a pilot project, under the direction of Becky Ryder, was launched to develop ways to preserve and digitize a sample of the fragile Daily Racing Form issues from 1896 to 1991.
As part of the pilot project, issues of the Daily Racing Form previously archived in bound books had to be separated and carefully evaluated based on condition and page order. After physical preparation of the newspaper's pages, UK Libraries staff digitized the issues utilizing a hybrid technique that combined microfilm and digital imaging. The new digital images were then processed through software programs that transform images into keyword searchable text to create a searchable online archive of 132,000 pages and 549,000 articles. Researchers can find information about horses, people, farms, tracks and much more. [The pilot project took two years to complete].
"By employing a hybrid approach that includes conservation, microfilm and digital access, we created assets that will parlay their value, over and over, into the future,” said Ryder, head of Preservation Services at UK Libraries.
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To complete this valuable work, UK Libraries and Keeneland hope to find additional partners and individual donors who would like to help preserve this very important irreplaceable resource of the horse racing industry.
See Also: Access the Pilot Database
The database can be searched or browsed by year and in some cases event. For example, here's a collection of stories about The Kentucky Derby.
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