Museum in Antigonish moves a century’s worth of local news online
Posted Feb 21, 2024 08:21:15 AM.
Last Updated Feb 22, 2024 05:25:40 AM.
More than a century’s worth of local news in Nova Scotia is now free to view online courtesy of the Antigonish Heritage Museum.
For the past three years, the curator of the museum worked with Halifax’s Precision Digital on moving The Casket’s decades worth of archives online.
Barry MacKenzie says The Casket’s archives were previously only available on microfilm at the Nova Scotia Archives or St. Francis Xavier University.
He says the response to the digitization of the celebrated newspaper has been astonishing.
“Big cities will always be served by some sort of major media,” he tells CityNews Halifax.
“But little communities like this, it is such a significant part of the history and the community that people feel quite attached so I think the excitement has been a combination of people looking forward to the accessibility buth then also the fact that The Casket was such an institution here.”
Founded in 1852 under publisher John Boyd, MacKenzie says The Casket served Antigonish County and much of eastern regions of Nova Scotia, telling local stories until it was acquired by The Chronicle Herald in 2012 and became an asset of its Saltwire network of newspapers.
MacKenzie says future issues will continue to be added every week until the archives are complete, but adds it will be months before the entire collection is available in the database.
