The second step to digitally archiving newspapers is getting a big scanner. The first step is getting the newspapers. 

It should be simple—gaining access to old newspapers, digitising them, and making them accessible—but it’s not. Each stage is an obstacle, and each obstacle is sweat, tears, and, most of all, money

It Starts with Trying to Find Newspapers

Think about the last newspaper stand you saw—last week, last month, or last year? Think about all the chatter from the people talking over the papers without buying. None of those papers are our priority—the information they hold is most likely already online. The papers we are looking for are the not-online ones, older than you can remember, most of them published before you, I, or the internet was born. Way before.

We are looking for newspapers published in 2010 and earlier—before publishing online became mainstream in Nigeria–and going all the way back to the 1800s.  These days, you can only find them in public libraries and private archives, if you find them at all. When you need to find answers quickly, you should not have to go all the way to reach them. That five-hour commitment you need to find answers; we want to reduce it to five seconds.

Our assignment is to locate these publishers and title owners, reach an agreement, digitise what they give us, and make them accessible to you. Our pitch to paper publishers is clear: we believe your legacy work should be preserved forever, so let’s preserve it for you, and in return, you allow us make it accessible to everyone.

This has costs and complexities.

Chasing Publishers, Getting Chased

This is what chasing a newspaper title looks like.

On 7th February 2024, after scheduling a meeting through relentless phone calls and texts, Esther and Ify from our operations team, travelled to Benin City to meet with the editorial leadership of The Nigerian Observer, a daily newspaper published since 1968 and owned by the Edo State Government. It was an eight-hour road trip.

The general manager of the newspaper was enthusiastic in his support but could not give approval to move the newspapers to Lagos without the governor’s consent. He drove them to the Edo State Government House to submit a request letter with a warning that it could take weeks or months; there is still no response. Esther and Ify returned to Lagos empty-handed. Our efforts to get the governor’s consent have failed, for now.

The general manager of the newspaper was enthusiastic in his support but could not give approval to move the newspapers to Lagos without the governor’s consent.

But Esther did not stop.

The following week, she headed to Port Harcourt to visit The Tide,  another state-owned newspaper publishing company founded in 1971. She had to wait for over four hours before she could meet the current editor who assured her that he was willing to assist us. She returned to Lagos with the good news but in the weeks that followed all her calls to him went unanswered.

He ghosted.

The team also travelled to other states to meet with publishers with little to no results.

Sometimes, we get lucky. In 2023, one of our earliest volunteers, Lade, came through for the team. She knew someone who knew the publishers of  P.M. News, a newspaper launched in 1994 after the military takeover by General Sani Abacha. This meant we had a title covering what feels like a “darkness before dawn,” the final four years of Nigeria’s dictatorship and the major events that followed.

The cost of moving the newspapers was relatively low as the P.M. News head office is in Lagos. The papers came as heavy, bound volumes, and all of them could fit in a sedan. We expect that, in some cases—say we were trying to move papers from Jos to Lagos—the costs will be significantly higher.

IT'S SCANNING TIME!

The post-pandemic global supply chain crisis that started in 2020 meant that what should have taken three months took thirteen months for our digitisation workstation to arrive. It has a large enough flatbed that not only scans two pages at once, but also helps us scan dozens of pages every hour. It feels like a small gain when you’re trying to scan forty pages, compared to say, a digital camera. But when you’re trying to scan hundreds of thousands of pages within a year, it saves us months of work.

This efficiency cost us roughly ₦50 million, adjusted for inflation.

While the scanner is the single most expensive piece of equipment we need to get the job done, we also need laptops, monitors, hard drives, monitor stands, and cooling devices. 

Building a digital archive requires dedicated human effort. Archivi.ng was driven primarily by volunteers but we needed more commitment than they can offer. Boyega and Grace became full-time archivists in April 2023, scanning an average of 2,000 pages of newspapers and magazines weekly. On their best week in early 2024, they pulled off over 5,000 pages.

Boyega and Grace put in 40 hours weekly and in April 2023 were scanning 2000 pages of newspapers and magazines weekly

But it does not stop at scanning. Every scanned page goes through quality control—crooked images are straightened, faulty pages are rescanned—before being renamed and uploaded to the cloud. Fifty thousand pages are currently accessible on Archivi.ng, as we continue to chase publishers. Every page you see there has been scanned on average, two times. 

A digitisation operation means full-time work hours, electricity, fiber internet, admin and most significantly, storage costs. 

Storage is potentially going to be some of the largest costs in Archivi.ng’s future. By November 2023, over 10% of our monthly recurring expenses went to cloud and other technology infrastructure costs. We found some respite in an Amazon Web Service Activate Program $5,000 grant through our friends at Paystack, but we will soon run out. We are going to get more inventive about how to keep our technology costs low while keeping Archivi.ng useful for everyone. 

What started as a mission to make history accessible by digitising and building platforms has now led to a dedicated team working across multiple roles: storytelling, operations, product development, research, and others.

But Where Does the Money Come From?

Archivi.ng is a non-profit; but it is expensive work nonetheless. So far, the bulk of Archivi.ng’s inflow has come from donations from individuals like you, and grants from institutions. We expect that it will continue to represent a very significant part of our inflow over the next two to three years. As we figure out a path to sustainability, we are going to be exploring multiple paths to revenue to keep our work going.

Our flywheel for Archivi.ng’s sustainability has three levers:

1. We will continue digitising old archival materials
2. Enabling access in multiple interesting ways
3. Seeking paths to generate income to keep the engine running while keeping access free.

Operations kicked off in 2023 with money we raised from donations from less than fifty people. To keep us going, Seyi led a crowdfunding campaign early in 2024, raising over $14,000 in the middle of an economic downturn. The smallest single donation was ₦1,000, the largest was $3,000—it gives you a sense of the range of people who believe Archivi.ng deserves to exist.

Since inception, we have raised over $60,000 from strangers on the Internet, in Nigeria and across the world, including non-Nigerians across two continents.

It is Not Enough to Just Digitise

Newspapers do not have repair buttons. Once they deteriorate, which they do really fast, they are gone for good. All the stories, context, and nuance they hold disappear forever. Our work beyond digitising, is enabling access to the information these pages hold. We will dig into the pages, find stories and insights, and share them with you.

It is why we have launched The Archivist to make it even easier for you to discover and understand history with nuance, in a way that feels easy to digest. We will continue to build momentum—improving our processes, growing the team, and keeping history accessible. They will continue to cost money, and we will continue to get inventive about how to keep the work going.

So, whether you are an individual, or representing an organisation, as long as you donate or figure out ways for us to get more resources, you are contributing towards a future where our context remains within the reach of everyone born today, and in the future.

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