It was a busy September for me. First, my husband’s family converged in Eugene for a week of reminiscing and celebration. We scrambled to furnish our house ahead of the long-planned gathering. I even ended up with Bill Dellinger’s old dining room table, if you can believe that.
We had our roof repaired and then our ceiling.
I headed up to UO’s Portland campus for the Snowden interns reception, a bon voyage to our intern, Miles, and a way to say thank you to the program that launched my career and that of hundreds of other journalists.
When I was a Snowden intern with The Register-Guard, the newspaper was still in the old building on Chad Drive. I returned there last month for a special project that’s near and dear to my heart.
In both this position and the one I previously held in Bloomington, Indiana, it was important to me to ensure the newspaper’s digital archive was as complete as possible. I found here in Eugene, our partner in digitization has large gaps in its collection. I connected with Steve Baker, who agreed to allow me to ship the microfilm still in the old building to newspapers.com, a division of Ancestry.
The Baker family has maintained the collection of both bound books and microfilm from The Register-Guard and its predecessors in the building on Chad Drive since the R-G moved. I am grateful to them for keeping this collection safe and organized.
Microfilm of The Register-Guard is packed for shipping to newspapers.com.
I am shipping 17 boxes to newspapers.com and expect in a few months our digital archive will be more complete.
It will help people like a woman who called the R-G recently looking for information about herself. She wanted to know if we had published a birth announcement for her in the 1970s, but that part of the archive has not been digitized so to find out she will have to go to the library and scroll through images of past pages.
Once all the microfilm, both what I have gathered to send and that already in the queue, has been digitized, everyone with access to a public library that subscribes to ancestry.com should be able to search the full archive with just a few keywords.
Jill Bond, editor of The Register-Guard, shows off her lit-up dress at the Eugene BRiGHT Parade.
Finally, I was invited to be a judge at the Eugene BRiGHT Parade. I looked through our photo galleries from past years and saw exactly what this celebration is all about. That inspired me to join the festivities wholeheartedly, picking up a vintage sequined dress from Wild Paisley. I adorned that dress with so many lights, children flocked to me like I was straight out of their favorite cartoon.
As one of my fellow judges exclaimed while watching the parade, “I love Eugene!”
Jill Bond is editor of The Register-Guard. Reach her at jbond@registerguard.com.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Register Guard collects microfilm for digitization