Nigerian newspaper archivists lead ambitious goal to preserve history online

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00:00 Hi, my name is Fouad Lawal.

00:07 I am the project lead at Archiving.

00:09 Our mission is to make Nigerian history accessible by digitizing old newspapers.

00:13 I am trying to take all this information from this to this.

00:35 By seeing everybody's images, this is the work.

01:05 Publishing did not really become mainstream in Nigeria online until the late 2000s, early

01:11 2010s.

01:12 And the people that were in print, the bulk of publishers could not, for the most part,

01:18 even afford the work of bringing all of their archives online.

01:22 And so what we end up with is this massive repository of history that very few people

01:28 have access to.

01:29 And so the question became, if I have this need, how many more people have this need?

01:35 And that's pretty much how we got started.

01:37 [Video plays] [Applause]

01:57 It is those little things, because whenever we think of history, we tend to think about

02:12 big things, politics, leadership.

02:14 But it's also the small things, like how did we date in the '70s, and what were we eating,

02:20 when did Jollof rice become mainstream, right?

02:23 When did we start fighting over Jollof rice?

02:25 It's definitely not the '60s, right?

02:27 So when I think of misinformation and even disinformation, I think of it fundamentally

02:36 as serving one purpose.

02:37 There is a massive information vacuum, and our archives are going to fill it up.

02:49 Documentation is very, very important because it helps preservation of information, especially

03:06 lost information or not enough information that is there on the internet, because most

03:12 of these things we are documenting, you can't find them in real details or in its originality.

03:19 [Video plays] [Applause]

03:20 >> Thank you.

03:44 >> We spent the last few months digitizing the archives.

04:03 The team has been doubling down, like just enforcing and ensuring quality control.

04:07 And now we want to take the very first version of those archives out to everyone.

04:13 What it will help them do is most important thing, search for papers and view the papers.

04:20 What we would have done, even though it is the very, very early version, is that we've

04:23 saved them a five-hour trip to a library from five hours to five seconds.

04:44 [Applause] [Video plays]

05:13 (propeller whirring)