Several years ago, the Broadway musical "Rent" asked, "How do you measure a year in the life?"

For almost 150 years, the Boothbay Register has been "measuring" each week in the life of the region, recording events - significant and routine - and help is now needed to make sure that written record is preserved with the “Your History, Your Story” campaign.

On Thursday, Aug. 14, Boothbay Region Historical Society (BRHS) Vice President Merritt Blakeslee and Community Policing Officer and "lover of history" Larry Brown brought a request to the Community Center, asking for volunteers to help preserve Register issues from its beginning in 1876 to 2013, the year the newspaper's e-edition started.

Volunteers in the joint BRHS and Boothbay Register project will work at the Maine State Library in Augusta, scanning issues of the Register into a digitized data base there. That data base will provide easy access to past issues of the region's newspaper, searchable within "Digital Maine."

"We plan to have people work in pairs," Blakeslee said. "We are looking for people who have an interest in history and are willing to take one day per week or every other week and spend 5- 8 hours." Volunteers will be trained and compensated $.070 per mile for the trip and $20 per day for a meal while there. Hours are scheduled Mondays-Fridays.

Blakeslee said Maine State Library and Adam Fisher, Director of Collections Development and Digital Initiatives, have been generous in giving the project "...a lot of their scanning area and let us in the Library while it's undergoing construction."

As previously reported in The Register, "According to Fisher, the Register is Maine's second-oldest weekly newspaper." The Library has also permitted the use of its $60,000 Zeutschel overhead scanner.  

In the future, the data base will also be searchable via BRHS and Boothbay Register websites.

"You can see how things have changed and how important the Register is to this community," Brown said. Among examples of this is a Nov. 3, 1888 issue containing information for an upcoming voter referendum on the split over the water system one year before Boothbay Harbor became a separate town.

As Blakeslee explained, "The Maine State Library will have physical and digitized copies in their climate-controlled archives." Until recently, historic Register copies were divided among three repositories, with some earliest issues at BRHS, others in the Lincoln County Courthouse vault and others at the Register office.

Blakeslee explained that some issues are not in good shape and some - as with a weekly edition from 1916 - are the only ones that exist in the world. The entire year of issues from 1900 is missing.

Brown added that volunteering for the project, "...offers something for folks so they can become involved in understanding our community."

Those interested in volunteering can contact Boothbay Register Operations Manager Sarah Morley at 207-844-4630 or Merritt Blakeslee, Boothbay Region Historical Society at contact the society at (207) 633-0820, Wed. - Sat.