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2 minutes to read Posted on Thursday May 14, 2020

Updated on Monday November 6, 2023

portrait of Jolan Wuyts

Jolan Wuyts

Collections Editor , Europeana Foundation

Developing Europeana Newspapers

This month on Europeana Pro we are exploring how our relaunched collections website helps audiences to explore the wealth of Europe’s cultural heritage. In this post, we share how we are working to improve the Europeana Newspapers collection and help our audiences explore key documents of European cultural heritage.

main image
Title:
At Breakfast
Creator:
Laurits Andersen Ring
Institution:
Nationalmuseum
Country:
Sweden

How can you use Europeana Newspapers? 

Launched in 2019, the Europeana Newspapers collection gives access to hundreds of newspaper titles and millions of newspaper pages spanning four centuries and 20 countries from across Europe. It brings together these documents for historians, researchers, culture-lovers and educators alike, with newspapers in the collection dating from 1618 to 1996.

Europeana Newspapers allows people to search these newspapers in a number of ways, giving you the opportunity to: 

  • View and browse individual pages from newspapers

  • Search the full text of newspapers or search only in the metadata

  • Search the collections by date, country of origin, and individual word 

  • Download the newspaper pages as high resolution images, or their raw data via the API 

Tempted to start browsing? Read our accompanying series of blogs on newspapers and their role as an important part of our cultural heritage.

What improvements are we working on? 

We are constantly working to improve our collections, and have listened to your feedback on Europeana Newspapers. While we weren’t initially able to deploy all of the features we wanted on the website, we are committed to improving the experience. 

In the next month we will launch a functionality which will help make searching for keywords across the collection more efficient. Currently when you search for a keyword in the collection, the results tell you in which newspapers the word appears, but don’t allow you to browse the individual text of each page to see where the result was found. With this new functionality, you will be able to see on which page the word was found, and also jump straight to that page to see where it appears - something that we hope will make your search experience faster and more satisfying. 

Title:
Screenshot of the refreshed search functionality for newspapers on the relaunched Europeana collections site
Creator:
Europeana Foundation
Date:
2020
Country:
Netherlands

In the coming three months, we will also work to allow you to continue your search within a single issue of a newspaper so that you can find the relevant word across all pages of an issue - explore an example from Google books. The functionality we want to implement will highlight the word you searched for across all pages of an issue, and offer the ability to navigate between these pages rather than click individually into each page. 

We are working on this now and aim to launch this for you in June this year. With further development we hope that the Europeana newspapers collection can become a source of leading innovations in newspapers research and reuse. 

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