Helping Preserve Horse Racing's Majestic History
LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 14, 2010) - From time to time, the sporting world is captivated with the story of two dueling noble horses racing for the same glory. In recent times, racing fans clamored for news of Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta, and through the years popular duels on the dirt track between Alydar and Affirmed, War Admiral and Seabiscuit, and Man o' War and Sir Barton captured the world's attention. For more than 100 years these larger-than-life legends have come alive in the pages of the Daily Racing Form. A project between Keeneland and University of Kentucky Libraries aims to preserve this valuable historic coverage for future generations to enjoy and access online.
In 2007, Keeneland Library approached UK Libraries to design a preservation plan for Keeneland's 3,500 volume archive of the Daily Racing Form and its former publication, The Morning Telegraph. Through funding from Keeneland and research by UK Libraries, a pilot project, under the direction of Becky Ryder, was launched to develop ways to preserve and digitize a sample of the fragile Daily Racing Form issues from 1896 to 1991.
As part of the pilot project, issues of the Daily Racing Form previously archived in bound books had to be separated and carefully evaluated based on condition and page order. After physical preparation of the newspaper's pages, UK Libraries staff digitized the issues utilizing a hybrid technique that combined microfilm and digital imaging. The new digital images were then processed through software programs that transform images into keyword searchable text to create a searchable online archive of 132,000 pages and 549,000 articles. Researchers can find information about horses, people, farms, tracks and much more. To view archives from the pilot project for the Daily Racing Form, visit online at www.keeneland.com/drfarchives.
"By employing a hybrid approach that includes conservation, microfilm and digital access, we created assets that will parlay their value, over and over, into the future,” said Ryder, head of Preservation Services at UK Libraries.
Keeneland and UK hope to continue this work by preserving and digitizing the rest of the Daily Racing Form collection. UK Libraries is hard at work to develop cost-effective strategies to finish the work. As part of the research challenge, UK must continue to create preservation methods that capture the essence of the publication as its physical layouts, condition and page counts change over the decades. In the end, the searchability of the Daily Racing Form must be equally robust throughout the publication’s history with an eye toward its future.
To complete this valuable work, UK Libraries and Keeneland hope to find additional partners and individual donors who would like to help preserve this very important irreplaceable resource of the horse racing industry.
"We have an industry that relishes, almost sanctifies history, and pedigree, and tradition and pageantry. And for an industry that has those priorities what could be more important than the preservation of the written word of that history," said Keeneland President and CEO Nick Nicholson.
For more information on the project, watch a video from Keeneland Library on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uzNtdb7Vwk.
To donate to the Daily Racing Form (DRF) Preservation Project, send checks payable to "University of Kentucky" with a note about the DRF Preservation Project. Mail checks to: Daily Racing Form Preservation Project, Attn: Becky Ryder, 110 M.I. King Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0039. For more information about giving, contact Becky Ryder at becky.ryder@uky.edu or (859) 227-5376.