DeKALB –  The completion of the Northern Star digitization project, an effort to convert print issues from 1899 to 1997 to a digital format, was originally slated for the end of the 2023 fall semester but has been delayed.

Matthew Short, an assistant professor and digital collections and metadata librarian, is one of three contributors to the project. He explained the reason for the delays and elaborated on the overall process. 

“For the last 12 years, we’ve been using the same platform: Islandora. One of the key components of that software, Drupal 7, reaches end of life in December,” Short said.

Before the current platform becomes obsolete, Short and others are migrating content to a new digital collection platform. 

“Funding for migration was provided from the Luce Foundation for the Southeast Asia Digital Library, which recently went live with a new version. We’re now using what we learned on that project to move our attention over to our other two sites: the NIU Digital Library and Nickels & Dimes,” Short said.

These two archives are being digitized first in order to prevent duplication, but the Northern Star collection will immediately follow, as the digitization of the issues was completed as far back as 2023 and simply needs to be migrated to the new platform. 

The final step in the project is to publish everything to the NIU Digital Library.

“I’ll need to build and run approximately 65 batches at 100 issues per batch, which means exporting metadata, matching it up with the PDFs and uploading to our digital collections platform,” Short said.

Northern Star print issues from 1923 to 1997 will be put online during the spring 2025 semester once the migration to a new digital collection platform is complete.