If you’ve ever seen our reoccurring segment that takes a look at archival copies of the Warren and Barrington Gazette from 100 years ago, you’ve seen that there is always something interesting to explore from the vault here at East Bay Media Group.

This locally and family-owned newspaper group, whose flagship Bristol Phoenix publication has been continuously publishing since 1837, began publishing a Warren and Barrington variant in 1866 — and we haven’t stopped since.

Now, thanks to the forward-thinking of the George Hail Free Library, the rich history of Warren that has been tirelessly catalogued through our newspapers of yore will be forever safeguarded digitally for readers of future centuries, whether they’re looking for historical clues during a research project or they’re simply trying to look into their own distant family past.

Chris Matos, George Hail’s Director, explained that the impetus to digitize the microfiche reels that currently hold all this historic information became clear in the past couple of years.

“Our microfiche machine is getting expensive to maintain,” she said. “We just upgraded our computers last year and we had to do a special workaround to get the microfiche machine to communicate to the computers.”

Matos said that technicians to work on microfiche machines have also become increasingly expensive to hire, as it is an increasingly niche field.

“It’s written on the wall that microfiche, although it’s still a good and reliable form for saving things, is not going to be easy for us to maintain here,” she said. “So we realized we needed to get ahead of things here and get it digitized.”

So after a meeting with the library’s Board, it was agreed to be a worthwhile investment to contract with Advantage Archives, an Iowa-based company that specializes in digitizing microfiche and print archives into a searchable database. The process took about three months. The same company performed a similar service for the Bristol Historical and Preservation Society with the Bristol Phoenix archives (which go back to the very beginning of the company as well).

While it wasn’t cheap — Matos disclosed that it cost north of $12,000 out of the library’s budget — but the result is a clean and easily navigable site that can take keyword searches and date ranges and spit out a list of timestamped results, which lead to high-resolution PDF pages from the old newspapers and even highlights areas on the pages where your search term comes up.

As of right now, the digital archive is only available on computers within the library itself, but Matos said that the plan is to release a public-facing version that can be accessed remotely soon. There’s a wrinkle there too, as newspaper stories are copyrighted for 95 years in Rhode Island, so only newspapers from 1866 to 1925 will be accessible in that version, at least to start. As for the library-exclusive database, Matos said that they plan to continue adding archived copies from 1993 and up to 2000.

“It’s something that a lot of our patrons ask for,” Matos said. “We got a lot of feedback that it’s not easy to search the microfiche. You have to pinpoint the exact date and know exactly what you’re looking for. So we wanted to add that level of functionality of putting in a word and having it all pop up.”

Matos said that she is hopeful local historians and those interested in history will utilize the service, and provided a good example of where it would have come in handy; mentioning the recent interest in Boston Tea Party participant and Warren resident Nicholas Campbell, who appeared in our pages throughout the past 150 years in various articles following a brief search of his name.