The Louisville Leader was an African American newspaper published between 1917 and 1950. The building housing the newspaper burned in 1954 but many editions of the newspaper were saved and stored on microfilm by the University of Louisville.
But efforts to produce searchable digital versions of the microfilm copies have been unsuccessful. Optical character recognition software has been unable to accurately identify many characters from the faded images on the microfilm.
The university is asking the public with help to transcribe the digitized microfilm images so that it can produce a searchable online database of the newspaper’s archives. People interested in participating in this historical preservation project can do so here.
