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(Editor's note: Alan Hall, the longtime director of the Public Library of Steubenville and Jefferson County, was a frequent contributor to the Herald-Star. His writing continued after he retired and became director emeritus. This column was written before his death on Sept. 12 at the age of 71.)
A. Eileen Cozart was her name, and we first met in 1983 when I was named the new director of the Public Library of Steubenville and Jefferson County.
She entered the Main Library several days a week, and went directly to the microfilm reader located on the balcony in those days.
She would sit all day transcribing newspaper articles from the microfilmed Herald-Star newspaper ranging from 1806 until 1950.
Cozart would then develop weekly newspaper articles using direct portions of those newspapers showing the specific date in which the article appeared. Some of her articles dealt with one specific topic, such as Abraham Lincoln's visit to Steubenville, while others would outline various businesses around Jefferson County.
I introduced myself to her one day as the "new library director," to which she responded, "Yes, I know. You were the director of a small library in Northwest Ohio before coming here, I want to hear about your education."
I told her that I received my master's degree in library science from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and worked at the Freiberger Library there, after receiving my bachelor's degree in education from West Virginia University as well as a minor in library science.
"You should have gone to Ohio State … But that is because I went there" she laughed.
She was aware that I was a native of Marietta, and in high school and college I worked at the county library there and was assigned to develop their local history archives.
Over the years that she used the library's microfilm to develop her articles, we became well-acquainted, and she was delighted that my son, Shawn, went to OSU and often treated him with various crafts that she made.
Eileen wished there was a better way to utilize her articles to capture local history, and I suggested she index the articles and the library could retain a file of the articles, but she just muttered that it was too much work. She said she kept them in chronological order by the date(s) that the article originally appeared.
As years passed her health declined and the articles stopped. The library had a few of the articles in our files, but she objected to any "organized system" to retain them. Her library visits ended and library staff would check on her from time to time. Cozart died on Valentine's Day 2014 at the age of 91.
With the opening of the Schiappa Branch Library in 1987, we started a local history department there and we moved the handful of Cozart articles to the file cabinet there. I was sorry that her vast amount of information had not been captured.
After my retirement in 2019, I returned to the Main Library and volunteered a couple days a week doing online cataloging, book mending and working with the archives.
In May, current library director Mike Gray smiled one day and pointed to three plastic totes sitting in front of my computer workstation, and said, "You will never guess what is in those totes!" I answered, "Book donations that I should review?"
"Well, yes, they are items belonging to Eileen Cozart donated by her family."
I was shocked, as 11 years had passed since her death, and she always talked about what items she had lost to flooding in her home on Risdon Avenue, and could not imagine what would fill three totes.
Well, there were a few local history books, but about half were filled with all those articles arranged by the date they originally appeared, "Reflections on the history of Jefferson County."
Mike said, "I thought you would want to work on them."
Looking at the volume of the articles, I could not imagine how many there could be.
The answer was 1,035 articles that appeared in the Herald-Star from 1977 to 1996.
What a wonderful gift these would be. Better yet, Eileen's early concerns about access and indexing were resolved by computer technology as the library system now has the Digital Shoebox online system which digitizes materials and makes them available online for public use accessing them by words and phrases.
Eileen's history from original sources would now exist
But first, I had to re-sort the articles by the dates they appeared in the Herald-Star from 1977 to 1996 and I would have to cut and paste them onto an 8½-by-11 format for better digitizing.
Fortunately, she had photocopied the articles onto regular paper, as newsprint doesn't have a long lifespan.
After her death, many people commented that it was unfortunate that Cozart had not written a book, but years later she has with these articles and their access through the library.
But before you get too excited by these "new" resources, it has taken me seven weeks to cut and paste 1,035 articles onto acid-free paper, put them in Mylar sleeves and then 10 three-ring binders.
Now, Erika Grubbs, the library's local history librarian, will slowly digitize Cozart's articles one-by-one adding subject entries and move them into the Digital Shoebox.
"The scanning software that I use is able to apply optical character recognition to the articles which, when it works well, makes every word within an article searchable," Grubbs explained.
\"How well OCR works depends on the quality and clarity of the text. In many cases, especially with the older articles, OCR is quite spotty and it is necessary to manually type in subjects, and important names, keywords and dates," she added.
The growing collection can be viewed on the Digital Shoebox by typing "Reflections on the Heritage of Jefferson County, Ohio" in the search box within PLSJ's book collection. Erika noted that at this time, 530 articles have been uploaded.
By last count, the Digital Shoebox contains more than 200,000 pages of materials, and more than 5,000 photographs of local history.
So, while you are waiting and watching the addition of the Cozart articles, you can access lots of other local history at digitalshoebox.org