Making historical newspaper content accessible: Europeana Newspapers
Guest blog by Europeana Newspapers' Marieke Willems, LIBER Communication Officer EU Projects.
Newspapers are an everyman’s source of information reporting on major events, natural disasters, famous people and everyday life. Today’s newspapers are accessible to all in paper or electronic format, but how accessible are newspapers from over 100 years ago?
The Europeana Newspapers project conducted a survey to discover the current state of newspaper digitisation in European libraries. One of the key points revealed by the survey was the fact that only 26% of the libraries have digitised more than 10% of their newspaper content. The survey showed that a third of the surveyed libraries had never employed any techniques to make the full text of their newspaper content searchable. Of the libraries who had experimented with Optical Character Recognition (the process by which scanned images of handwritten or printed text are converted into a machine-readable format), only half were confident enough in the quality of this work to make it available to their users. It is worth mentioning that the majority of the surveyed libraries (85%) give free access to their digitised newspaper collections.
From Europeana Newspapers
The Europeana Newspapers project aims to improve access to historic newspaper content by making 18 million newspaper pages from 12 European libraries freely accessible via The European Library and Europeana. What's more, 10 million of these pages will be refined with Optical Character Recognition, Optical Layout Recognition and Named Entity Recognition which will allow users to search the full text for individual articles, people, geographical places and organisations.
From Europeana Newspapers
A browser uniquely for newspapers is being developed by The European Library to make this rich collection of 250 years of historic newspapers - the oldest dating back as far as the 17th century - easily accessible.
The Europeana Newspapers project is a Best Practice Network and shares its best practices in workshops, national information days and through its website www.europeana-newspapers.eu. Take a look at the video of our first workshop at which we shared best practices in refinement.
The next workshop is about 'Aggregation and Presentation' and will take place at The European Library’s conference: Promoting innovation in Europe on 16 September in Amsterdam. At this workshop, the Europeana Newspaper browser will be presented and tested. Would you like to be one of the first to test the Europeana Newspapers Browser? Register now for the Amsterdam workshop.
From Europeana Newspapers
Work in all of these areas will continue until the Europeana Newspapers project finishes in January 2015. We are interested in hearing from any libraries with digitised newspaper collections, who may want to join the project's network.
For more information, please see www.europeana-newspapers.eu or follow our project news via the newsletter, Twitter (@eurnews) and Facebook.