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It will take months, in fits and starts, with a completion date set for late 2020. The lab’s high-speed scanner can go through up to 2,000 pages each minute. But quality control takes a lot more time.

Photo by BRANDON HARDER / Regina Leader-Post

Hahn is tasked with reviewing if the result is legible, searchable and properly catalogued. She enjoys working with the collection. Along the way, she has learned about how rural Saskatchewan viewed the coming of war in September 1939.

“I’m really surprised, at the beginning of war, how much it wasn’t bigger news,” saidHahn, an archival technician. She found the war sharing pride of place with weddings and cattle prices.

Curt Campbell, manager of records processing and preservation services for the Archives, was also struck by the stark contrast.

“It gives this interesting juxtaposition,” he said. “There’s this huge thing that’s about to happen to the world. But at the same time, the micro-ness of life still continues on.”

He gets the sense that the war didn’t come as a shock to the people of rural Saskatchewan. They’d been there before.

“You don’t have that same level of innocence or optimism that you had in the First World War when a war was declared, and everybody thought it was a grand adventure,” he said. “This is more of a grim determination.”

That’s the impression that comes from reading the Rosetown Eagle.

“We are called to save humanity from an aggressor who has no limit to his greed — the madman, Adolf Hitler,” the Eagle proclaimed on Sept. 7. “His path to power in Germany has been the path of suppression, bloodshed and oblivion for whoever disputed his march…