UK Libraries is thrilled to share the results of a digital preservation project several years in the making.
La Voz de Kentucky, a bilingual Spanish-English newspaper published biweekly in Lexington from 2001 to 2019, was freely available in doctor’s offices, businesses, and on newsstands throughout Central Kentucky during its long run.
Now, thanks to the efforts of experts, specialists, and technicians from across the Libraries, the help of Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Ruth Brown, and a unique partnership with La Voz editor and publisher Andrés Cruz, the one-of-a-kind publication will be saved for generations of students, researchers, and community members to come.
185 digitized issues of La Voz de Kentucky are now freely available through the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program and the Internet Archive.
While there are a small number of other Spanish-language newspapers in Kentucky, they usually reproduce the local or national news for Spanish-speaking readers. La Voz, on the other hand, was dedicated explicitly to community-building – and community bridging – thanks to the tireless efforts of Cruz.
“Cruz was dedicated to La Voz being a bilingual publication,” said Modern & Classical Languages Librarian Taylor Leigh. “Stories in the paper were published in pairs, with English and Spanish versions side-by-side. The sheer effort to get the paper out on a biweekly basis, and to translate it, all while working other jobs: it was a true labor of love. It was very important to him to build connections between communities in Lexington. This is the aim of all the work he has done here as a community organizer.”
The publication run of La Voz coincides almost exactly with the rapid growth of Central Kentucky’s Hispanic population, which increased by over 250% in Fayette County from 2000-2020. The paper not only offers an in-depth, on-the-ground account of this chapter in the region’s history, but was itself pivotal in the community’s formation.
Central Kentucky’s Hispanic community began to grow significantly in the late 1990s as more migrant and seasonal workers found employment in the tobacco and horse industries. During Lexington’s housing boom in the early 2000s, many seasonal workers, familiar with the area, shifted into the construction and service industries and settled permanently. When they were joined by their families and children, or started families of their own, the Hispanic immigrant population jumped dramatically, putting sudden pressure on social services and the educational system as the city scrambled to keep up.
For the researcher, La Voz opens a window into this world. “La Voz is one of the best sources we have to document the growth of Lexington’s Hispanic community,” said Brown. “You can uncover part of this history in the major newspapers, but it’s almost always white voices talking about Hispanic people. But the stories that ran in La Voz were totally community-generated.”
Editors’ columns address immediate community concerns, from health programs to immigration raids. Publicity for burgeoning community resources show the establishment of key social and cultural organizations. And the paper’s advertisements show the growth of businesses and institutions that would become anchors in the community. “Researchers can trace all of this in the stories, the ads, and the incredible photographs: what the needs of the community were, and who was responding,” said Brown. “It is so valuable to have access to this unbelievable depth of information.”
“La Voz isn’t just historical reporting,” she added. “It’s a multi-voiced narrative that gave tremendous agency to a group that was heavily minoritized at that time. It gave the Hispanic population a lot of independence. For a community that had suddenly become very visible, La Voz helped to validate that visibility.”
Brown plans to rely heavily on the collection for her annual Hispanic Kentucky course, which uses 100% local sources. “I am always looking for more Spanish-language sources, and I’m thrilled that my students will now have access to nearly two decades of La Voz,” she said. “To have this paper saved, searchable, and accessible: it’s incredible. There’s nothing else like it.”
La Voz’s path from printed page to digital collection was a meandering one, faced with uniquely 21st-century challenges.
Copies of the paper were sporadically collected by long-time Head of Preservation Services Becky Ryder, who worked for UK Libraries from 1992 to 2010. In 2021, existing paper copies were consolidated and cataloged: those 84 print issues are held by the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), with coverage from 2001-2007.
To fill out the gaps in the collection, Leigh and University Archivist Ruth Bryan enrolled the help of Brown, a collaborator with Leigh in the Kentucky Hispanic Heritage Project and a personal friend of Cruz.
“Taylor told me that he was interested in collecting these materials,’ said Brown. “And I said, ‘Well, I see Andres at the YMCA.’ So I texted him, and we found out he was interested in donating.”
So it was that the first of several donations took place in the parking lot of the Lexington North YMCA in 2023: a box with 326 CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that contained born-digital copies of La Voz from various years.
“La Voz was only ever printed: it wasn’t digital,” explained Bryan. “So what we were working with here were born-digital copies of a printed paper.”
The discs arrived to the library in something of a jumble: on spindles and in jewel cases, lacking a systemic labeling system, and having been stored in less than ideal conditions. Such a large collection of optical media prompted the creation of a new workflow and experimentation with new data-processing tools. Digital Archivist Andrew McDonnell and Image Management Specialist Shell Dunn began a five-day process of disc migration, followed by the long and thankless task of appraising, describing, and formatting the whopping total of 54,873 files across 1,902 directories.
“Our ultimate goal was extracting and preserving as many full issues of the newspaper as possible,” said McDonnell. Luckily, several clearly-labeled and print-ready full PDF issues were scattered throughout the collection, together with another 50 issues that required only minor interventions to prepare for the archive.
More complicated work came in the form of trying to re-engineer PDF versions of issues that had only arrived as older InDesign files. “We were dealing with a lot of variation in the way that files had been packaged for the original printer, and irregularities from issue to issue,” said McDonnell. “As is often the case with born-digital materials, if we had received these files in the archive 15-20 years earlier, this work would have been considerably simpler”
In a uniquely modern paradox, digital materials proved exponentially more difficult to access and preserve than much older printed materials. The majority of the donated issues had been prepared using Adobe InDesign CS3 on an Apple computer, and the files were no longer compatible with modern versions of Adobe Creative Suite running on the Windows machines used in the SCRC.
Luck saved the day: the SCRC happened to have a 2009 iMac hanging around with a pre-Creative Cloud version of InDesign CS6. That machine was capable of rendering the full documents.
“The road to that revelation was a winding one, but once we sorted out the compatibility issues, we were able to export 15 full issues from the older InDesign files and accompanying media and fonts,” said McDonnell. “All together, after all of our sifting, snooping, file union, and file reconstruction, we were left with a representative run of issues of La Voz in born-digital format that spanned 102 issues across eight years, from 2003-2011.”
Web Development Librarian Eric Weig took all the finished content and wrote the Python script that worked with the Internet Archive, and the La Voz collection went live this summer.
The story of La Voz will serve as a model for UK Libraries’ preservation efforts in the technologically-perplexing and information-saturated 21st century.
“We are so inundated by information that it’s easy to assume that everything online will be there forever, but in fact the opposite is true,” said Kopana Terry, Oral History Archivist & Historic Newspapers Curator. “Librarians and historians are already speaking about a ‘digital dark ages.’”
File formats and physical media often reach obsolescence within years, and web hosting is an expensive and easily-abandoned proposition: a web publisher stops paying, and the data that once seemed permanently alive is wiped from the servers and lost to time.
Compounding the problem are the wholesale changes in newspaper preservation since the turn of the century. A long-time national leader in newspaper preservation, UK Libraries ended its model microfilming operation in the mid-2000s as it transitioned its efforts to digitization.
“We performed a very vital service to the state through our preservation department,” said Terry. “Publishers and editors of small newspapers across Kentucky had a sense of well-being that their content was being preserved – and it was all free. Now, most preservation services are pay-to-play.”
In a consolidated media environment, small papers today are often owned by conglomerates who don’t have particularly local concerns, and preservation efforts are deprioritized to cut costs.
“There are rural editors out there with a great desire to see their history saved, but the ability to do that rests with the corporate board in New York,” said Terry. “That’s what makes La Voz such a remarkable success story. La Voz is a local paper, with local stories, from a local publisher – who happened to be someone who was open to working with us to save it.”
“A lot of our contemporary newspaper titles and born-digital collections are very patchy,” she added. “Even though we don’t have a complete run of La Voz, it is so much more complete than many contemporary titles. This just adds to its uniqueness as a collection.”
Of course, UK Libraries’ accession of La Voz depended on a lot of things going right, especially in the formation of personal relationships between the Libraries and Cruz. Thankfully, that relationship has only deepened. Cruz sat for an oral history interview with Leigh in 2024 in which he discussed his childhood in Costa Rica, his immigration to Kentucky, and his broad engagement with communities across Lexington. He has also recovered additional La Voz files, which he has donated to the Libraries.
“The relationship between communities and the institutions who are meant to be those communities’ ‘history keepers’ can be a fraught one,” said Brown. “I hope this process will help build more trust between the Libraries and the communities they serve. I know someone out there has all the Latino Festival posters in their closet: wouldn’t those be amazing to have? Hopefully the success of La Voz will show that there is value in saving these things. This is worth doing.”
“This experience is a model for how to work with publishers: a model of how to engage publishers to preserve their content,” said Terry. “It really requires a personal relationship. Every one that we’re able to forge is going to pay dividends.”
