For Immediate Release: CHNC’s Top Journeymen Editor reaches 100,000 words!

The Colorado State Library would like to congratulate Jude, CHNC’s Top Journeymen Editor, for correcting over 100,000 words found in the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection (CHNC).  Text correcting is a wonderful way to get involved in CHNC and volunteer.  Best of all it’s free to sign up and you can do it from your home.

Why should you correct text? The CHNC uses optical character recognition (OCR) to translate the image of a newspaper article into text.  OCR technology has improved greatly over the years but many of CHNC’s earlier newspaper content suffers from poor text translations.  For example, “Oak Creek” may be translated into text as “Oak Crook.”  Since CHNC only searches the translated text, incorrect translation can cause fewer search results.  Text correcting helps improve your searching and the searching of every other CHNC user.

One of the first articles Jude corrected was about her great-great-great-grandmother dying on a train in Park County, Colorado in 1884.  Jude noted, “The first time I found the article, shortly after the newspapers were made available online, it was hard to find, even though I knew when she died.  Searching for that article didn’t work because of the limitations of OCR.”  CHNC had translated her ancestor’s name incorrectly.  After going through and correcting her name, Jude can now type ‘Mary Wurts’ into the search box, and it’s the first article that comes up.

As CHNC’s first Journeymen Editor to reach 100,000 words, CHNC is offering a special one time reward of digitizing one microfilm reel of the historic newspaper of Jude’s choice.   Jude’s newspaper of choice?  The Rifle Telegram Reveille (1917-1920).  This is very exciting news, as there are currently no issues of the Rifle Telegram Reveille in CHNC. This new content, estimated to be added to CHNC this coming September, will join Rifle’s other historic newspapers, the Rifle Reveille and the Rifle Telegram already in CHNC.  The two newspapers merged into the Rifle Telegram Reveille in 1916.  

While text correcting is invaluable to providing our users with better search results, it is also rewarding and just a little addictive.  Read this article to learn more about how to correct text and how to register for a CHNC account.