Allerton Library Digital Archives

Ten years ago, 2wav developed the Newspaper and Yearbook Archive for the Allerton Public Library in Monticello, IL. We are proud that this simple, functional tool is still serving citizens today.

The archive contains over a hundred years of newspapers, yearbooks and other documents, in a specialized PDF format from HF Group which overlays high resolution digital scans with searchable OCR text. Text is extracted and stored in MongoDB with an optimized index, enabling fast and flexible search by text, date, town or publication.

The result is certainly fun to explore. Shown here are results from the query in the screenshot, a search for “Algegra” in the 1964 Mansfield Yearbook.

We recently updated the server platform to current versions of Linux, NodeJS and supporting modules. It was interesting to see how this old-school NodeJS programming held up over time. Back then we were using a lot of Meteor, but we intentionally chose to build this simple app with very basic techniques: Javascript ES5, Express, EJS templates, jQuery, on NodeJS 0.10.x. It served well, with literally no emergent bugs over the years. In the recent update, we changed nothing but the logo and the supporting software and libraries. There were a few hiccups making the old code compatible with recent libraries, but overall the process was quick and probably far less trouble than if we had been jumping major versions on an advanced framework. It was fun and nostalgic to look back at the early days of NodeJS, and gratifying to work with the Allerton Public Library to keep this elegant little app in service to the public.

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