General News
18 February, 2026
Digitisations finalised
THE Cobden and District Historical Society has finished digitising old Cobden Times newspapers from as early as 1890 to recent years in a bid to make information and research more accessible.
Secretary Delia Kerr said the move to digitising their records has been a three-year journey which was made possible thanks to grants from the Gwen and Edna Jones Foundation, Cobden and Camperdown Community Bendigo Bank and Imaging Australia New Zealand (IANZ).
The historical society had a total of 87 rolls of micro reels digitised, including 80 of the Cobden Times and seven of the Heytesbury Reformer, which was bought by the Cobden Times in 1918.
“They were on micro reels and our micro reel machine doesn’t work and it’s $13,000 for a new one,” Mrs Kerr said.
“They’re really dear and you’ve got to keep updating them.
“Whereas if you’ve got them digitised, you’ve got them on your computer and you can just access them.
“Imaging Australia New Zealand, a company in Melbourne, they’ve done it all.”
Mrs Kerr said having the digitisations of the newspaper on hard drives meant research could be done more smoothly and their access to information was better than ever.
“Having these digitisations helps with search requests for families or buildings or for businesses that were in buildings – all of that,” she said.
“It helps with my research for Facebook articles.
“Other people can then use it as well for their family history, for a fee.
“You can just go and look it up and there it is.”
IANZ sales and marketing director Max Petts said their company worked to digitise documents and make them more accessible.
“At our company we have two separate entities – one is we sell and service equipment that digitises like what we’ve done here, which is micro film,” he said.
“The second part of it is that we actually do digitisation for organisations of all shapes and sizes.
“Particularly with this project, we run what we call the IANZ grants which is a private investor has given us a lump sum of money in the hopes that we then pass those funds onto smaller entities, mainly historical societies, to help them get their archives digitised and make it more accessible.
“In this case we’ve had quite a substantial amount of roll film which is the Cobden Times and the Heytesbury Reformer and we’ve digitised that over the last couple of years.”
Mr Petts said there were a bounty of benefits to digitising physical materials.
“Physical materials fade over time,” he said.
“Particularly with micro film, it was the first digitisation available – it was taking photos and putting them onto reels of film, which are a lot more stable than paper.
“Over time though reels do disintegrate and get what’s called vinegar syndrome and grow mouldy and fade as well so that’s preserving the content of those as well so that’s why it’s important.”
One of the biggest benefits of these documents now being digitised is the ability to search them for quick information access.
“It’s digitally accessible, so you can access them anywhere and it’s easier, you’re not having to look through reels and reels to find what you’re looking for – you can just search it up,” Mr Petts said.
“Further from that we’ve put optical character recognition on these articles as well, which essentially makes the document searchable.
“Like a standard PDF you can copy and paste and search throughout it so you no longer have to scroll through it to look for what you want to find.
“It streamlines the process considerably.”
Cobden and Camperdown Community Bendigo Bank director Joan Scott said the bank was very supportive of the project.
“The Cobden and Camperdown Community Bendigo Bank is very pleased to be involved in the project in restoring the history of Cobden back to its safe home,” she said.