If you've ever gotten seasick scrolling through a roll of microfilm looking for something in an old newspaper, or worse yet, had to flip through dusty, crumbling bound volumes of the real thing, you'll love this.

A project to digitize several decades of the defunct Urbana Daily Courier newspaper could turn out to be a test bed for easily searchable, computerized versions of a "newspaper of record" for every county in Illinois, all accessible via the Web.

University of Illinois and local officials will unveil the digital version of the Courier at a special event from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday in the Urbana Free Library Auditorium. The event, sponsored by the UI, the Urbana library and the Champaign County Historical Archives, is free and open to the public.

The UI's History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library has completed the digitization of Courier editions for the years 1916-25 and is working now on 1926-35. Mary Stuart, UI history, philosophy and newspaper librarian, said the plan is eventually to do the years from the Courier's inception in 1897 to 1915 as well.

The decade from 1916-25 got to be first in line for digitization because of the variety of interesting events during the period, from the nation's entry into World War I, the adoption of a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote and a deadly international flu pandemic to the opening of Chanute Field in Rantoul, the Black Sox scandal, the first radio broadcast in Illinois at Tuscola in 1922, and the UI career of Red Grange.

Meanwhile, the UI library, with a planning grant from the Illinois State Library, is working with the Chicago History Museum and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield on a proposal for digitizing newspapers around the state under a federal program to do that nationally.

"We wanted to get some experience under our belt with newspaper digitization," said Stuart, who headed the Courier project with UI colleague Nathan Yarasavage. The project, which took about nine months, was funded by a federal Library Services and Technology Act grant through the state library and by the Clifford Family Endowment.

Stuart said it costs about a dollar per page to digitize newspapers and about 30,000 pages were done for the first decade of the Courier project.

The UI chose the Courier because it is an "orphan" unlikely to be digitized otherwise, nor are there much in the way of paper copies left. The university also has its own microfilm of the paper from 1897 to 1935, with solid coverage from 1902 on, Stuart said.

That microfilm was digitized by Olive Software, a newspaper digitizing specialist, which worked with the library to index and annotate the paper to make it searchable.

Users can get full copies of Courier editions, flip through them on screen and virtually clip individual articles, among other things. The material also can be downloaded as .pdf files.

"It's fully keyword searchable," Stuart said, including capability to limit searches to the body of articles, headlines, classified and other advertising, for example.

"Of course, you can search on names," Stuart added.

Users also can do such things as call up just the front pages in a date range and send links to particular articles via e-mail.

The digitized paper is available through the UI History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library Web site and accessible using nothing more than a standard Web browser.

"It's free to anybody, anywhere who has an Internet connection," Stuart said.

Yarasavage will demonstrate the system at the Urbana library event Saturday. Organizers also have invited as many former employees of the Courier as they could find to come and talk about the paper, which went out of business in 1979.

More information is available at www.library.uiuc.edu/hix