Staff complete project to digitize back issues of The Chanticleer student newspaper

A project that has been years in the making is in the very final stages, thanks to the dedication of two Coastal Carolina University employees.

Scott Bacon, coordinator of digital initiatives for Kimbel Library, and Ben Burroughs, director of the Horry County Archives Center at Kimbel Library, partnered several years ago to digitize and display all of the issues of The Chanticleer, the student-run newspaper at CCU that has been published since 1962. 

Kimbel Library has been collecting and storing issues of the paper for decades, but the decision to digitize them was so researchers and other stakeholders could access the issues without having to handle the original copies, said Bacon. 

The process began in Spring 2016. The University of South Carolina Libraries scanned the hard copies of the papers, then Burroughs took those TIFF files, cropped them, combined them and saved them as PDFs. Each PDF had text recognition processing performed on it, which enables the PDF to be searched by keyword.

Once each issue was scanned and the PDF created, they were batch uploaded to CCU's digital repository, the CCU Digital Commons, in February. 

"We can all learn something from this collection," said Bacon, "just as we learn history through other historial documents. The Chanticleer may be the only existing record of certain events and occurrences that took place on campus."

For example, Bacon said, the first issue of The Chanticleer, then called the Fledgling, features the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Coastal Carolina branch of the University of South Carolina. "The next several hundred issues continue to explore the growth of Coastal, revealing topics of interest to the campus community." (The paper's name changed to The Chanticleer in the fall of 1963.)

Ian Brooking, senior communication major and current editor of The Chanticleer, echoes those sentiments.

"There are so many benefits to having the newspaper digitized and accessible to everyone, not just people in the CCU community," he said. "Former alumni who probably don't remember having a paper can go back through the issues and say, 'Wow, I remember when that happened!'"

Peruse back issues of The Chanticleer here, and view the current newspaper's website here.