Case Study: Migrating Lehigh University's student newspaper collection to Veridian

In 1878 the Linderman Library was opened on the Lehigh University Campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This stunning building is a fitting home for Lehigh’s Special Collections which preserves and provides access to historical collections of rare books, manuscripts and the Lehigh University digital archives.

Amongst the digitized materials is a collection of 6,548 issues of Lehigh’s student newspaper - The Brown and White, which was founded in 1894.

In recent years the newspaper has been presented online via a self-hosted CONTENTdm instance.
Because OCLC was ceasing support for this version of the platform and charging significantly more for their hosted solution, the Lehigh digital archives team sought out a new solution.

From CONTENTdm to Veridian

In 2019 the decision was made to migrate The Brown and White newspaper collection to Veridian, which would refine the collection’s directory structure and also provide significant improvements to its appearance, usability and scalability.

It was very important to the University that the article segmentation they had previously invested in would be preserved during the migration project.

The investment in article segmentation is a big one, and the enhancements it can bring to a digital collection can be just as great. By identifying, segmenting, and categorizing individual newspaper articles as they appear on the page, much richer search options are available.

Lehigh’s Digital Archivist Alex Japha explains:

“Once the Lehigh Libraries decided to migrate away from our legacy CONTENTdm repository, it provided an opportunity for us to reassess how our student newspaper could be searched and used. Most important to us was the preservation of article segmentation. The metadata that enables this feature was time and labor intensive to create when the newspaper was first digitized over a decade ago. Very few software products allow for the searching and viewing of article level data, so this was a distinct advantage of Veridian.”

In the past we had migrated CONTENTdm collections to Veridian where the articles had not been defined (page level segmentation), but the Lehigh University project presented an opportunity for us to convert an article segmented newspaper collection from CONTENTdm for the first time.