Impending Death of Newspaper Obits Gives a Library Chance To Connect with Community
Orange County Library System awarded IMLS grant to explore feasibility of obituary database By Michael Kelley Oct 3, 2011The steady demise of the newspaper obituary has become an opportunity for a Florida library to fill a growing cultural gap, with a helping hand from federal grant money.
The Orange County Library System (OCLS) received on September 27 a $50,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to explore the feasibility for an openly accessible online database into which the families of deceased individuals can upload obituaries. The library will provide $21,754 in matching funds for the project.
"This is a wonderful time for libraries to really look at things in fresh perspective, to be innovative, and to reconnect with our communities," said Donna Bachowski, the head of reference, who will be leading the EPOCH project (Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage). "Hyperlocalism is really important and it is a place where we can connect our past with contemporary technology," she said.
A core component of OCLS's services is genealogy; it serves as the state library for the Florida State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Obituaries, in turn, are an important part of genealogical research as well as a vital source of local history.
However, even as library staff noticed a marked increase in the usage statistics for their two genealogical databases, there was a 63 percent reduction in the number of obituaries published by the Orlando Sentinel, according to the library's grant application.
Funeral professionals attributed the decline in newspaper obituaries to the cost: a seven-line obituary published for one day in the Sentinel starts at $87. A two-day obituary with a photo can cost $206 and increase significantly from there.
The decline in obituaries was reflected in the library's obituary indexing, Bachowski said.
"We are really losing some important information here," she said.
The EPOCH project, which would be an offshoot of the library's four-year-old Orlando Memory project, envisions family and friends of the deceased submitting detailed obituaries, including videos, photographs, or other memorabilia, that the library will store and display via a content management system. The prototype is scheduled to be completed by November 2012.
The IMLS director, Susan Hildreth, makes the final decision on grant awards, relying heavily on the recommendations of peer reviewers, who are not members of the IMLS staff. The grants are awarded to projects that have the potential to elevate library practice, according to the 2011 panelist handbook.
"If local newspapers are jeopardized, so too is the important role they have played in documenting and capturing community memory," IMLS said in a statement about the OCLS grant. "[The grant] will allow...the public library to explore alternative strategies for capturing and sorting such news as part of a long-term historical record to ensure this memory is not lost."
Frances Roehm, the librarian for SkokieNet, a hyperlocal website run by the Skokie Public Library in Illinois, said the library indexes obituaries and will post the obits of prominent people to SkokieNet, but they do not go as far as Orange County envisions.
"I applaud any library's effort to work with the community to develop these types of resources," Roehm said.
A focus of the Orange County project, under the terms of the IMLS grant, is to provide a toolkit that would help other communities implement a similar project. Specific issues to be addressed include:
--- addressing potential privacy issues;
--- consulting with metadata experts at the Florida Center for Library Automation to ensure that the information in the database conforms to the Encoded Archive Context (a metadata standard for electronic archives that makes information available via common search methodologies);
--- developing a detailed list of essential equipment;
--- creating curriculum and supporting documentation for user instruction;
---- working with focus groups, including reaching out to small newspapers and funerary organizations.
"After we develop the prototype and get feedback from the community, we hope to get another grant to implement the project," Bachowski said. "We really want to provide a resource for the community where they can come and share that special local history that is so important and that we are losing at such a rapid rate," she said.
Keeping the community connected and informed is a part of the library's responsibility, she said. "And, long term, in 30 years, we will have a terrific resource available."
