The ‘Manchester Enterprise‘ archive is fixed!
Top half of the front page of the April 8, 1886, edition of Manchester Enterprise. From archive.
by Fritz Swanson
If you go to https://themanchestermirror.com/History/ you will find links to every extant copy of the Manchester Enterprise, the newspaper that served Manchester from 1867 until about 2014. Since about 2022, those files were inaccessible because of a technical issue with the web-hosting company that hosts the Manchester Mirror. That technical issue has now been resolved.
Manchester Enterprise was a print newspaper. Many issues were collected by the Manchester Township Library, and then by the Manchester District Library (MDL). As the physical collection grew, that collection transferred to microfilm sometime in the middle of the 20th century. What they did was photograph every two-page spread of the paper, and those photos were preserved on physical rolls of film.
In the early 21st century (around 2006) those microfilm copies of the Enterprise were digitized. What that physically meant was that each of those photos of those two-page spreads was photographed again, but this time digitally. The output of this process was thousands and thousands of .tiff files. Every file is about 1–3MB in size. The files have a uniform naming convention, so for example, the April 7, 1892, issue is spread across four files: Apr071892p01.TIF, Apr071892p02p03.TIF, Apr071892p04p05.TIF, Apr071892p06.TIF .
Once digitized, those files were held by the Manchester District Library as a series of 99 CD-ROMs. In 2017, I, at the time an MDL Board Member in addition to the Manchester Mirror publisher, transferred those files into an archive on our website. (You can read our announcement of that here.) Physically that meant copying the contents of each disc by hand onto a single external hard drive, and then uploading the files by FTP to the web server.
Sometime in 2022 the web host for the Mirror updated the permissions on the files in such a way as to make them inaccessible. For the last three years we have been searching for an outside solution as well as periodically seeking a correction from our web host. Sunday, they finally fixed the files.
So HOORAY! You can access the files again!
Copies of all the files remain available at MDL both on the original CD-ROMs and also on thumb drives held at the front desk. If you are doing a lot of work with the old Enterprise files, it is recommended that you borrow one of the thumb drives and copy all of the files onto a drive you own.
Let’s make lots and lots of copies of the files. Because digital preservation is never permanent preservation, we as a community have to stay engaged with preservation as an active process. The work is never done.
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