News of the past is no longer limited to newspaper print as the result of a collaboration partnership between the Museum of Seminole County History, the Sanford Museum, Celery Soup, and the UCF Department of History.

Seminole County Historical Society led the initiative, by raising funds to cover the costs of digitizing original newspapers and microfilm published from 1908 to 2005. Over 300 rolls of microfilm were digitized by local business partner, EZ Photo Scan. The Sanford Historical Society, Inc. also joined the effort with fundraising, making the project a true working partnership. Together, these historical societies dedicated countless hours to review completed scans, provide quality control and assure the scans are legible. Without their tireless effort, this treasure trove of newspapers would remain physically archived without digital preservation.

Final digitized images were supplied to RICHES™ to complete optical character recognition (OCR), a technology that enables the conversion of various types of documents into editable and searchable data. The ORC process ran continuously for nearly two years. Earlier newspapers were very slow to process due to print quality, but the more recent documents are processing much faster.

Accessing the Sanford Herald 1908-2005 Collection
You can view the current Sanford Herald 1908-2005 collection by clicking the following link: https://richesmi.cah.ucf.edu/sanford_herald/.