Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the National Library of Austria.

The National Library of Austria and its newspapers collection.

The history of the Austrian National Library is strongly connected to the Habsburg court. As successor to the Court Library, its beginnings can be found in the 14^th century. Historians see 1368 as the founding date, since the existence of the collection’s oldest book can be proved for this year. The Austrian National Library comprises about 10 million objects spread over various collections – valuable papyri and historic globes as well as maps or a special collection on planned languages. It is Austria’s legal deposit library, the country’s largest library as well as the central scientific library. But as an institution preserving the cultural heritage it reaches out to the public as well; through exhibitions and four museums attached to the library. The library’s ancient history is also represented by architecture. The stunning baroque State Hall (Prunksaal) is amongst the world’s most beautiful historic libraries and a formidable tourist attraction.

Newspapers are collected as part of the library’s legal obligations. The collection reflects Austria’s eventful history quite well. Periodicals and papers published in different territories ruled by the Habsburg dynasty can be found just as the first modern newspapers in Greek language or Brazilian newspapers published during the time when Maria Leopoldina of Habsburg was Empress consort of Brazil.

Digitisation of newspapers and its impact on the Austrian National Library

Newspapers are versatile sources for a variety of research questions – from demographics to genealogy, from price indices to themes and topics surrounding everyday life. But newspapers as a source can offer even more: Due to the short life span of the medium, reports and articles capture contemporary reactions to an event. Hence these can serve as new and fruitful angle on certain historical questions.

Digitisation of newspapers also brings about the advantage of improving the preservation of originals. Paper quality is often poor and in many cases only limited usage is allowed due to conservation issues. Therefore digital versions allow for broader public access while easing the pressure on originals.

Apart from those advantages mentioned above, newspaper digitisation serves also to improve the completeness of collections. It is almost impossible to store every published issue of a daily newspaper over decades or in some cases even centuries. Digitisation enables libraries to fill the blank spaces of their collections by co-operations with other institutions, hence offering more complete collections of newspapers than single libraries on their own.

In 2003 the Austrian National Library’s digital newspaper reading room ANNO – AustriaN Newspapers Online – went online. So far some 600 newspapers and magazines have been made accessible, containing some 11.5 million pages. An average of about 2000 readers utilizes the online portal daily. The high rate of usage shows that ANNO is very well received by the public. Research has also shown that a wide range of topics is accessed, thus indicating the widespread interest in historical newspapers. Being part of the Europeana Newspaper project allows us to provide our users with OCR-ed full text and therefore increase usability and accessibility. As a consequence, a first version of full-text search for ANNO went online about a year ago.

The Austrian National Library’s role in the Europeana Newspapers Project

The Austrian National Library provides about 1.6 million OCR-ed pages and metadata of about 6 million pages to the project, thus making the library a major content provider within the project partners. So far nearly 1.4 million OCR-ed pages have been prepared and work on the allocation of the lacking material is carried out at the moment.

Vienna was also the venue of the annual meeting in 2014 (See: fourth newsletter for more information). An information day is planned as well in which more details of Europeana Newspapers will be presented to the interested public.

Not only Austrian newspapers will be provided by the Austrian National Library but also German-speaking newspapers published in regions of the former Habsburg Empire such as the ‘Agramer Zeitung’ published in Zagreb or the ‘Pester Lloyd’ of Budapest as well as newspapers in other languages, thus reflecting the country’s history in a central European setting.

For us the main challenge was the sheer scale of the project. To reach such an ambitious goal as collecting millions of newspaper pages requires a comprehensive approach, covering not only technical aspects but for example copyright issues as well. Being able to offer full text search to our reader is a step into the library’s future and we are keen to see how the public is using this tool.

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the National Library of Turkey.

The history of libraries within the borders of today’s Turkey goes back to the 2nd century b.c. to Hattusha, the capital city of the Hittites where a cuneiform script tablet collection was found, which is considered to be one of the oldest archives or libraries of world history. The Library of Pergamum and Celcus Library of Ephesus are great examples of the highly developed library culture of the ancient world.

Documentation about libraries from the Byzantine era rarely exists and only a few manuscripts from their collections were preserved. There is a small amount of authoritative content written on the Byzantine Libraries in Constantinople the writing is very limited and intertwined with the history of the Byzantium Empire. However, the library and script culture of the Ottoman Empire is better documented and it still affects many areas of the librarianship today:

• many Turkish libraries are accommodated in historical Ottoman buildings
• numerous libraries own big and valuable manuscript collections which are often prepared with artistic illustrations.

Among the Seljuks and the Ottomans, libraries were supported by pious foundations (vakıf). These were founded for the benefit of müderrise (history teachers) or for the population of districts in towns. In early Ottoman period libraries were located within mosques, türbes (“tombs”), dervish convents or imarets. During the reign of Beyazıd I, medreses began to found their own libraries. The first major Ottoman Library after the conquest of Constantinople was set up in the imperial palace. During the tulip period (1718-1730) libraries were built for the benefit of the population. In the provincial towns libraries were mostly confined to the mosques.

The first modern libraries emerged with the Military and Naval Engineering School in the late 18th century. Münif Pasha founded a research library, where main Western sources on the natural sciences could be found (1861). A state policy to reorganize the existing institutions was systematized with the Regulation of Public Education (1869) The Ministry of Education became responsible for the libraries within the empire. In 1882 the state for the first time founded a public library (Beyazıd Kütüphanesi).

With social and political processes of modernization the professionalization of the Turkish librarianship took place during the years after World War II, which showed itself in the foundation of the National Library. The National Library of Turkey started to provide service in 1946. Following closely the standards of librarianship and modern information technologies NLT boosts its service quality. Keeping and conserving the Works of our rich-cultured civilization born in this land that hosted many civilizations, the National Library of Turkey enables people to get benefit from these works in the best possible way. The NLT is well aware of its responsibilities in passing on culture, offering all its services to use.

The Turkish Bibliographical Institute which is subordinated to the National Library compiles the National Bibliography of Turkey and a bibliography of articles published in Turkish journals. In addition, it publishes various catalogues of special book collections in Turkish libraries, such as manuscripts and prints in the Arabic language. Furthermore, the National Library offers a microfilm-archive, the Atatürk Documentation Center, a collection of film posters, paintings and an online-collection of “talking books” for visually impaired. In the same building, a data processing center, a printer with bindery, a photo lab and a microfilm production lab are located.

As of 2013, The National Library of Turkey’s main building has a total 46,985 m2 usage area. With The National Archive, 4 major reading halls, a microfilm reading hall, a talking library for visually-impaired visitors, 8 multi-purpose halls, an interactive research hall and a non-book materials hall, 2 conference halls and an exhibition hall.

Our present age requires to access information in the easiest way. Taking into account this necessity the NLT has started its sources to be digitized.

Non- book materials Information System: In 2013, 32,177 non- book materials including 20,406 posters, 5,723 musical notes and 6,048 maps were digitized and 386 visitors used 2,236 non- book materials. These materials are planned to be served to the users under the name of “Fine Arts” in the first quarter of 2014. Other materials will be digitized gradually.

Why Newspapers?

As witnesses of the time and place newspapers are important because they offer a greater variety of news since hundreds of years. Newspapers still remain a good source for researchers and academics working in different fields. Newspapers are also important because they contain a spectrum of articles and photographs on topics ranging from local to global. Newspapers have been and will be a daily snapshot of history.

Digitizing Europe’s cultural heritage, making it accessible online and preserving it for future generations is one of the challenges of the Digital Agenda for Europe.

Digitized newspapers make information accessible to a diverse audience from all over the world. NLT started first with the digitization of old newspapers which were published during the Ottoman Empire and young republic years.

The multiple linguistic influences on Ottoman Turkish caused difficulties in spelling and writing. The constituent parts Turkish, Persian, and Arabic belong to three different language families Ural-Altaic, Indo-European, and Semitic, respectively and the writing system fits only Semitic. Phonological, grammatical, and etymological principles are quite different among the three families. For these reasons the necessities during the nineteenth century arise for a reform of the language.  With the establishment of the republic, Atatürk made language reform an important part of the nationalist program. The goal was to produce a language that was more Turkish and less Arabic and Persian; one that was practical and precise, and less difficult to learn. The Language Revolution (Dil Devrimi) officially began in May 1928, when numbers written in Arabic were replaced with their Western equivalents.

The process of mass digitization of newspaper collections in our library started with Ottoman Turkish newspapers. These items have already been digitized before the project. After being a partner of the European Newspapers Project the digitization of newspapers printed in new Turkish letters started. As a partner of the project, NLT has provided ca. 400,000 pages (200 thousand Ottoman and 200 thousand new Turkish) of its newspaper archive to the project. Major problems were faced during the implementation of this task. But, some pages were not suitable for the binarization process, because of their resolutions and dimensions. However, their view files were prepared correctly. OCR for newspapers in Ottoman Turkish is not possible and is a huge challenge. Researchers can just see the image content and the bibliographic information. At the Turkish Digital Library the newspaper content is accessible for free, when downloading the content user have to pay a fee.

NLT learns from Europeana Newspapers as a Best Practice Network project about OCR and other related technologies.

Au sein de l’établissement, une équipe s’est constituée autour du projet Europeana Newspapers et met à sa disposition une diversité de compétences : le département Droit, économie, politique, qui abrite l’essentiel des collections de presse de l’établissement, sélectionne et met en valeur les périodiques mis à la disposition du projet ; le service de la Numérisation en réalise la coordination technique (extractions des pages, définition des entités nommées, contrôle qualité, etc) ; le département de l’Information bibliographique et numérique se préoccupe de l’aspect métadonnées ; le département des Systèmes d’information met en place les outils nécessaires à l’échange des données ; la délégation aux Relations internationales assure l’interface politique et administrative avec le Consortium du projet.

Spécificités, critères de choix et souhaits d’évolution

La BnF présente dans ce projet plusieurs particularités notables. Avec plus de 5 millions de pages de presse numérisées (dont près de 4 millions océrisées), la BnF propose sur le web une des plus importantes hémérothèques numériques en Europe ; ce qui la place au rang de contributeur le plus important du projet en nombre de fascicules de journaux numérisés fournis (1 385 727 pages pour l’OCR et 1 002 761 pages pour l’OLR). Il s’agit du seul corpus en français du projet. Les journaux proposés sont libres de droit, et centrés sur la période contemporaine, du début du XIXème siècle au milieu du XXème siècle. La BnF soutient, au sein du projet, une position ouverte mais prudente quant à la réutilisation de ses données.

Le choix des journaux quotidiens pour le projet européen s’est porté sur les documents numérisés les plus consultés sur la bibliothèque numérique de la BnF, Gallica, tant par les chercheurs professionnels que par le grand public. D’autre part, leur volumétrie (plus de 100 000 pages pour les grands quotidiens, divisés en dizaines de milliers de fascicules) rend la recherche, l’interrogation par sujet ainsi que la navigation dans le texte, plus complexes que celles des collections de monographies ou des revues savantes.  Ces difficultés sont accentuées par l’absence presque totale de tables ou d’index pour les quotidiens français. L’amélioration de l’OCR, la segmentation à l’article des fichiers numérisés et l’indexation des titres amélioreront donc de façon considérable la visibilité de ces collections de journaux et leur utilisation par les webnautes. L’identification des titres des articles depuis les moteurs de recherches est enfin attendue comme une possibilité de flux supplémentaire de nouveaux utilisateurs vers Gallica et vers le catalogue de la BnF.

Outre les attentes citées ci-dessus, la BnF attend du projet des outils permettant des usages renouvelés pour la valorisation des fonds, comme la recherche des entités nommées, qui ouvrirait des perspectives nouvelles pour le traitement des discours (et leur évolution) dans la presse. Intéressant plutôt les chercheurs institutionnels (linguistes, politistes ou historiens de la littérature en particulier), ces évolutions profiteraient aussi au grand public, permettant par exemple aux généalogistes d’accéder plus facilement aux données nominatives. L’affinement de la segmentation à l’article doit permettre de retrouver une navigation qui restitue le rubriquage d’origine. Ainsi, l’identification systématique des rubriques devrait faciliter la recherche thématique sur de longues périodes de publication, sans avoir à feuilleter fascicule par fascicule. Les études monographiques (personnages ou évènements) seraient facilitées par l’indexation des sujets, permettant en quelques clics la constitution de dossiers documentaires (les vénérables « revues de presse »). Enfin, les perspectives ouvertes par le projet doivent permettre à terme une utilisation quantitative des sources de presse permettant des études d’opinion sur le long terme.

Le devenu célèbre “J’accuse” d’Emile Zola

Le 13 janvier 1898, Emile Zola publie une défense du capitaine Dreyfus, accusé de haute trahison, sous la forme d’une lettre ouverte au président de la République Félix Faure en une de l’Aurore. Ce véritable réquisitoire fait de l’affaire une question publique, nationale, mettant au centre de l’argumentation la République et ses valeurs. Cet article fit trembler le régime sur ses assises.

Premiers résultats

Concernant l’impact d’Europeana Newspapers sur les réalisations et projets propres de la BnF, l’utilisation concrète des résultats du projet devrait contribuer à une ouverture plus large vers l’extérieur des métadonnées produites par l’établissement. D’autre part, outre le passage de la BnF au format METS/ ALTO, les systèmes d’informations devront à terme, accueillir des développements permettant l’implantation et la lecture de fichiers OLRisés.

La BnF a décidé de fournir au projet une sélection des plus grands quotidiens du XIXème et XXème siècles, tenant compte des équilibres politiques et des sensibilités philosophiques et religieuses. L’intérêt porté par ces journaux aux relations internationales et à l’Europe en particulier fut, bien entendu, un critère de choix. C’est donc 26 titres d’une grande qualité littéraire et journalistique qui sont proposés pour le projet.

Les questions principales à l’étape actuelle du projet sont le contrôle qualité des fichiers reçus (niveau de reconnaissance des textes, segmentation correcte des articles, etc) et la comparaison avec d’autres versions océrisées préalablement : quelle version proposer, peut-on (doit-on ?) garder une version des fichiers OCR précédents, quels outils pour le contrôle et la comparaison, quels critères et quelles méthodologies enfin faudrait-il mettre en place ? Comment le travail sur les entités nommées pourrait être pris en compte ?

Ces questions posées par le projet pourront conduire à la mise en place de nouvelles synergies entre les différentes entités de ce grand établissement. Plus largement, en fonction des thématiques, une sélection documentaire concertée pourrait voir le jour au niveau européen. Mais ce serait là le début d’une autre histoire, qui dépasserait de très loin les seuls journaux de la BnF et le périmètre du projet…

Cet article en anglais est disponible ici.

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The french version of this article is available here.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) collects, preserves and makes the documentary heritage of France available to a large audience on its site and online. The BnF’s collections are unique in the world: 14 million books and printed documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps and plans, scores, coins, medals, sound documents, video and multimedia documents, etc. covering all disciplines. The BnF’s digital library, Gallica, provides access to over two and a half million documents.

Because of the wide range of activities linked to the Europeana Newspapers Project, a unique and tailor made team with colleagues coming from no less than 5 departments of the library is currently working together.

Which content does the BnF provide to the Europeana Newspapers Project? 

With more than 5 million of newspapers digitised pages (from which nearly 4 million are OCR-ed), the BnF offers one of the richest digitised newspaper collections in Europe and provides the project with the highest number of digitised issues (1,385,727 pages for OCR and 1,002,761 pages for OLR). This is the only corpus of the project in French.

The concerning newspapers are out of copyright and focus on a period ranging from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. They were selected with the idea of offering those newspapers that researchers and the general public request the most in the digital library Gallica.

A famous example is the well known “J’accuse”. On January 13th 1898, Emile Zola published on the front-page of “l’Aurore” a defense of Captain Dreyfus who was accused of high treason in the form of an open letter to President Félix Faure. In his plea, Zola is making this case as a national and public one, putting the Republic and its values at the center of his arguments. This article shook the regime on its foundations and has become one of the most famous newspaper articles ever.

What impact does and will the project have on your library and its users?

Researching specific topics and browsing through the text is more difficult with newspapers than with books or academic journals. The frequent lack of tables of contents or indexes in the French newspapers makes the research even more difficult. With the Europeana Newspapers Project, the accessibility to the journals collections and their usability by the internet users will be considerably bettered thanks to the improvement of OCR, the refinement by article and the indexing of each title. Moreover, we expect that the possibility for the search engines to identify article titles will generate additional traffic of new audiences towards Gallica and the BnF catalogue.

The Europeana Newspapers Project represents a formidable step forward for the BnF, to name a few: the metadata should be opened up more widely, the update of the METS/ALTO format is ongoing and the IT systems will have to develop functionalities in order to allow implementation and access to OLR files with Gallica.

Thanks to this project, the BnF is also working on the development of new tools to improve searches within its newspaper collections. Work is being done on named entities and on refinement by article. Even though these new functionalities are of particular interest to researchers (e.g. linguists, political scientists, literature historians), they will also benefit a larger audience as they will allow, for instance, genealogists to access personal data more easily.

With the project entering its third and final year, controlling the files once they have been OCR-ed and OCL-ed is keeping us busy, even if the quality control (level of text recognition, accurate refinement of articles, etc.) is done by sampling. Questions are also arising regarding, for example, the comparison with other previous OCR-ed versions: what version shall we propose? Can we (or should we) keep a version of the previous OCR files? What tools do we have at our disposal for the control and the comparison? What criteria and methodology should be applied? How the named entities should be implemented? We hope that these questions will create new synergies within the various departments of the library.

And what about having a concerted selection policy or even working together on thematic newspapers projects at a European level? Well, that would be the beginning of another story that would go much farther than the scope of this project…

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky. 

Hamburg is nowadays and has been one of Germany’s foremost media capitals – if not the most important one – since the late 17th century when already up to five newspapers appeared in Hamburg simultaneously. Its rich newspaper landscape throughout the centuries representing all types, variations and sizes of papers was admired by the contemporary public. The most important and long-lasting 40 newspapers comprise about 5 million pages until 1945, and there are many more titles for shorter spans of time. Thus, Hamburg provides a representative sample of the modern press which has exerted remarkable influence in Northern Germany and nationwide.

Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, first mentioned in 1479, is the largest general academic library in the city state of Hamburg and, at the same time, the central library of the University – founded in 1919 – and other Hamburg colleges. For the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, it acts as a Federal State and Archive Library (with legal deposit since 1696) and provides professional supervisory responsibility for the libraries of institutions of higher education in Hamburg.

The collections of the library comprise more than 4 million print and electronic media. They are universal comprising all kinds of media for all subject areas, including rich special collections of manuscripts, literary bequests, early printed books, serials, music prints and charts, special subject collections on politics and peace research, administrative sciences, Spain and Portugal, offshore and deep-sea fishing and the languages and cultures of the indigenous peoples of North America and the arctic territories. Hamburg State and University Library provides a wide range of services related to Northern Germany as a historical region: a comprehensive collection, regional bibliography, special reading room, “Hamburg Wissen Digital” as a web portal for region based research, digitised material (address books, journals, maps, charts, portraits, statistics, reference works, monographs) etc.

The library lost its whole newspaper collection during the ‘operation Gomorrha’ bombing campaign against Hamburg in July 1943, together with about 80 % of its holdings in general. Thereafter a comprehensive legal deposit collection for the city state of Hamburg has been built up, whereas only small and disperse parts of the old newspaper collection could be reconstructed, for the region as well as for some national and international papers.

Thus Hamburg State and University Library actively supported the efforts of the Microfilm Archive of the Press in German Language and the German Research Foundation to microfilm all German newspapers. From the 1970s onwards almost all newspaper published in Hamburg or the former neighbouring cities of Altona, Harburg, Bergedorf and Wandsbek were microfilmed. By merging the preserved newspaper holdings from the Hamburg State Archive, museum libraries, the Chamber of Commerce, the State and University Library and sometimes from cultural heritage institutions outside Hamburg the microfilm runs could be cooperatively completed as far as possible.

This meant that library users of historical newspapers in most cases had to use microfilms. Digitization became an urgent demand of users as well as librarians wishing to improve services and support academic research in the history of the press and the region. Newspapers are one of the most sought-after historical sources, because for the 17th to 21st centuries they reflect our political, economic and cultural history and coincidentally give an in-depth impression of everyday life.

The library prepared its first newspaper digitization project in 2011 and started scanning microfilms in 2012. Eight newspapers containing 2,5 million pages were chosen for a first tranche out of which 1,5 million pages became part of the Europeana Newspaper Project. They represent a wide variety of newspaper types:

1. Hamburger Börsenhalle, 1805-1904 (united with Hamburgischer Correspondent), a business paper
2. Hamburger Nachrichten, 1792-1939, beginning as an advertisement and local paper it developed into an important conservative political paper on national level, intimately accompanying Bismarck’s political career
3. Neue Hamburger Zeitung, 1896-1922, the serious liberal political paper from the same publishing house Girardet as and in 1922 merged with:
4. Hamburger Anzeiger, 1888-1957 (digitized until 1944), one of the most famous examples of the Generalanzeiger press, based on advertisements and liberal boulevard journalism
5. Hamburger Zeitung, published 1943, July 25^th to August 17^th and 1944, September 1^st to 1945, May 2^nd as a wartime cooperative venture of the last three remaining Hamburg newspapers: Hamburger Anzeiger, Hamburger Fremdenblatt and Hamburger Tageblatt
6. Altonaer Nachrichten, 1850-1941, a smaller regional and local paper from the city of Altona
7. Norddeutsche Nachrichten, 1879-1943, a local newspaper for the surroundings of Hamburg
8. Hamburgischer Correspondent, 1721-1934 (1905 united with: Börsenhalle), Hamburg’s most famous political paper of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Europe’s paper with the highest circulation (about 50.000 in 1803, 56.000 in 1808) during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period

All the aforementioned periodicals are or will soon be available to users of the Europeana Newspapers browser. The papers  no. 1-6 are being OCR-refined within the Europeana Newspaper project. The other two are to be integrated in the European newspaper browser later as well and will possibly undergo refinement procedures later.

The Europeana Newspaper Project was the first experience of Hamburg State and University Library in mass digitization, and it was its first case of digitization from microfilms. So lots of unknown problems had to be solved, or the expertise of colleagues from other libraries had to be adapted in a proper way. A great deal of the scanning and tagging processes for the Hamburg newspapers took place when the Europeana project had already begun. So the timelines for delivering scans and metadata to our partners from the University of Innsbruck and to CCS caused a special challenge. Another complicated task originated from the case that scans from different series of microfilms for one newspaper, for example the Hamburger Nachrichten, had to be merged into one consistent chronological series of scans. The same problem occurred when supplements to a newspaper had been microfilmed separately and the data had to be inserted into the chronology of the paper itself. Currently we are doing as much headline correction as possible for the Hamburger Nachrichten which is undergoing the OCR and OLR processes at CCS.

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the National Library of Poland.

The National Library of Poland acts as the central library of the state and one of the most important national cultural institutions. It was established in 1928 but its traditions date back to the beginning of the 18^th century and are associated with the life and work of Andrzej Stanisław Załuski and Józef Andrzej Załuski. They created the first large public and national library in Poland which – under the name of the Załuskis’ Library of the Republic of Poland – was taken into the custody of the state after its founders died. Tragic lots of the library – covering the period from the partitions of Poland to the Second World War – became one of the symbols of cultural losses of Poland.Today the National Library is the main archive of national literature, a national centre for bibliographic information and an important methodology centre serving other libraries in Poland. It also acts as a large research library focusing on the humanities and is one of the most important centres digitising cultural heritage in Poland.

The National Library’s digitisation studio produces 80,000 scans per day. POLONA, a new version of the Polish Digital National Library launched in June 2013, now presents more than 150,000 digital copies of books, magazines, maps, sheet music, photographs and prints which can be viewed, downloaded and used in any way – free of charge and without any restrictions. The scanned objects are available in their original resolution, without any ownership marks.

The National Library’s collection of 19^th – 21^st century periodicals comprises over 80,000 titles. It includes periodicals published in Poland as well as newspapers and magazines published abroad but pertaining to Poland or published in Polish. As regards the 19^th century press, the territorial range of the collection covers the areas which used to belong to Poland before the partitions and then (following the year 1794) to Prussia, Austria and Russia. Naturally there are publications in Polish (including Braille publications), but also periodicals in Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, English and French.The National Library’s collection has for many years been complemented with microfilm copies of periodicals constituting collections of Polish and foreign libraries; at the moment, it holds the most complete collection of periodicals published in areas belonging to Poland as well as Polish communities around the world.

Why newspapers?

adverts Chwila newspaper – National Library of Poland

The library’s focus on making newspapers and magazines available results from the fact that the information contained in these sources of material gives one of the most complete pictures of the past. They document nearly all the aspects of life at a specific time and place: from important historical events, through to scientific discoveries and cultural phenomena, fashion, gossip and mundane activities in the tips and classified ads sections. By browsing old annual sets of newspapers, one can follow topical discussions regarding events which are now history and can discover long-forgotten meanings and aspects of these events. Put simply, we can see the past through the eyes of those directly involved in it.

Europeana Newspapers

As a partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project, the National Library will make available more than 100,000 high quality full-text scans of Polish newspapers from the years 1914-1921. These newspapers historical events as well as everyday life of a period so important to the history of Poland and Europe.

Our participation in the project coincides with work on our POLONA digital library´s new interface and with the start of the process of mass digitisation of periodicals contained in the National Library’s collection. The new online presentation of periodicals will be made available to users at the beginning of 2014.

Kurier Warszawski newspaper – National Library of Poland

Among titles to be made available through the Europeana Newspapers Project, we have ‘Kurier Warszawski’ [‘The Warsaw Courier’] – a daily paper published in Warsaw from 1821 to 1939, one of the most important titles of the independent daily papers and one of the most modern daily papers published on the Polish soil. As of 1 April 1883, a morning and an evening issue were published. At the beginning of the 20^th century this paper of the intelligentsia of Warsaw was typically referred to as ‘a public utility institution – as indispensable to the life of the capital city as its lighting system, its waterworks or its means of transport’.

Within the framework of the project, users will also gain access to Jewish periodicals published both in Polish and in Yiddish. For example, ‘Chwila’ [‘The Moment’] which originated from an initiative of the Central Jewish National Council established in Lviv in 1918. The periodical was published in Polish and covered issues arising with respect to relations between Jews and non-Jewish population. The first issue came out on 10 January 1919. The periodical continued to be published until the outbreak of the Second World War. It is a valuable material for historians, literary researches and theatrologists. It contains information about the activity of political, economic, social, cultural, sports and charity institutions affiliating Polish Jews.

The First World War also set its stamp on periodicals for children. For example ‘Moje pisemko: tygodnik obrazkowy dla dzieci’ [‘My magazine. Illustrated weekly for children’] published in Warsaw in the years 1902-1915 and then in the years 1918-1936, which perfectly illustrates the changed publishing profile enforced by the war. Before the First World War the magazine was primarily focused on education through entertainment; following 1914, it clearly aimed at acquainting and familiarising the young reader with the reality of an armed conflict. As the conflict escalated, the pages of the weekly magazine started to be filled with photographs of war activities and weapons used while short stories framing the publication (and often printed in episodes) more and more frequently referred to current events which authors would process as to adapt them to the age of their readers. The magazine is excellent for researching the morals and everyday life during the war.

Mucha newspaper- National Library of Poland

Bright comments on current events can be found in satirical periodicals one of the most important of which was ‘Mucha’ [‘The Fly’] – a weekly magazine published in Warsaw in the years 1868-1939 and then in the years 1946-1952. Numerous outstanding Polish literary figures and illustrators collaborated with it.

All the aforementioned periodicals are or will soon be available to users of the Europeana Newspapers interface (to be launched in early 2014 as part of The European Library website).

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library.

The Teßmann Library in Bozen, Italy is the regional library for the German and the Ladinspeaking population in South Tyrol. It is the largest scientific and general library of the country and has 450,000 items in its collection including books, newspapers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, maps and pictures.

It also runs the Digital Newspaper Archive, a portal where anyone can access digitised historical newspapers held by the library. Between 2006 and 2011, some 1.5 million newspaper pages have been made available via this website. It presently offers access to 55 digitised newspapers and periodicals published in the area of historic Tyrol in the 19^th and beginning 20^th century. The material came from institutions across the Tyrol and Trentino regions of Austria and Italy, with microfilm and the original print versions being used to make the digital files.

The digitisation of such material is important for many reasons. First, newspapers are an important source of information; for local news and politics, for world affairs and as a testimonial of the past. They deliver immediate and spontaneous information as it was reported at the time. This means newspapers are a valuable resource for those working in fields such as history, social science and linguistics.

Another reason is that digitised newspapers need to be protected. Their fragile paper often suffers from decomposition and this is a major incentive for libraries and other institutions all over the world to scan large stocks of newspapers and to make these digitised versions accessible to the public via online portals.

In the case of the Teßmann Library, the early work that we did to digitise newspapers also had a direct benefit for the institution. Our experience meant that we were selected to take part in the Europeana Newspapers project. We were selected to supply the project with 1.2 million pages of newspapers and periodicals published in the local alpine area, printed mostly in German but also in Italian.

More than half of this has already been delivered to the technical partners of Europeana Newspapers. They will take the content and refine it using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), OLR (Optical Layer Recognition) and NER (Named Entity Recognition) techniques. At a later stage, these refined pages will be presented via Europeana and The European Library websites.

Our participation in this project is a great opportunity for the Teßmann Library since it increases the Library’s popularity and supports its goals as a forward-looking institution whose focus lies in promoting access to information.

Another important aspect is the networking – both social and professional – on an international scale. By making contacts with other institutions, we can benefit from their experience and expert knowledge. We expand our knowledge and share our own contribution and experience.

The current portal will be re-launched in the coming months with new features including full-text search, facetted search and a new layout. Names of people, places and organisations will also be tagged within the text to make it as easy as possible to locate content.

Finally, the Europeana Newspapers project is a key way for us to increase the quality of our existing portal of digitised newspapers by making the content accessible on the basis of full text search. This will make research within our digitised material easier, more precise and more complete.

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the British Library

The British Library is a networking partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project, sharing best practice in evaluation, metadata requirements and usability of digitised historic newspapers. The Library will also host two key events in 2014 to promote Europeana Newspapers: an information day on June 9th and a policy-related workshop on September 29-30th.

The expertise that the British Library brings to the Europeana Newspapers Project is based on a long history of collecting, curating and making available historic  newspapers.

In total, the Library holds an estimated 750 million pages of newspapers and periodicals. This number grows continually. Each year, about 1,934 UK and Irish newspaper and weekly/fortnightly periodical titles, and 242 overseas titles are received.

British and Irish newspapers from before the 19th century are mainly drawn from two important special collections.

1. The Thomason Tracts, a collection of printed pamphlets, books and newspapers related to the English Civil War. These were printed mainly in London between 1640 and 1661.
2. The Burney Collection of English newspapers and news pamphlets, dating from 1603 to 1817.

In addition, the Library has comprehensive holdings of most post-19th century British and Irish newspapers, received under legal deposit since 1869.

Digitisation of the Library’s historic newspapers started back in 2001 and a significant number of titles published from the 17-19th century are now available online. The Library continues to digitise its newspapers collection thanks to its Public Private Partnership with brightsolid and currently about 7 million pages can be searched via the British Newspapers Archive. The Archive includes over 3 million pages of 18th-19th century British newspapers digitised by the Library before 2009, with funding from Jisc.

The Importance of Historic Newspapers
Newspapers support scholarly research in countless areas of the humanities, social science, and the sciences, and present a particularly valuable resource for historians, genealogists, those interested in journalism, trade and advertising, print history and the arts, as well as the general public. Especially attractive for researchers of the visual arts are the Library’s holdings of illustrated fashion periodicals and Victorian illustrated newspapers. These include The Graphic (1869-1932) and The Illustrated Police News (1867-1951).

Increasingly researchers are looking to apply new methodologies to large collections of digitised newspapers. For example the Spatial Humanities Project at the University of Lancaster is using automated language processing techniques and Geographic Information Systems analysis to process and interrogate text data from newspapers.

As part of this project, text data from the Library’s digitised newspaper collections will be analysed together with books, census and population data, to help researchers answer a range of place-related questions about 19th century society in England and Wales. Similar approaches and methodologies could be applied to the corpus of digitised newspapers that the Europeana Newspapers Project is creating.

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the National Library of Latvia.

Founded in 1919, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) holds the largest collections of books, serials, maps, and sheet music in the country. It is both Latvia’s legal deposit library and a significant academic library. The NLL is also a competence centre for the library system and the driving force behind country’s major literacy and reading programmes for children and young adults.

In addition to these roles, the NLL is heavily involved in a range of challenges and events. In 2014, its collections and staff will relocate to a new library building, known as the Castle of Light.

This impressive structure, designed by renowned architect Gunnars Birkerts, is both technologically smart and architecturally impressive.

Next year, the library will also how major events being organised as part of Riga’s role as the European Capital of Culture 2014. In 2015, the NLL will be the office and meeting site for the Council of the European Union during Latvia’s presidency.

Digitisation is another major area of work for the NLL. It has been developing a National Digital Library for the past decade. The first digitisation project was launched in 1999, with about 2 million digitised pages of historical newspapers. Thanks to funding from the European Regional Development Fund, more than 700 titles of periodicals and 7000 books were also digitised. A new portal for digital collections and enhanced user interactivity was also made possible through this project.

Why newspapers?
Newspapers and magazines have always been an important source of data for historians – more so in Latvia where the process of reconstructing and rethinking the history after the World War II is still underway.

The history of Latvian periodicals mirrors the nation’s turbulent history, from the first national awakening in the 19th century until the regaining of freedom in 1990.

During the Soviet era (1945-1990) the operation of public media (along with all other kinds of publishing) was subjected to censorship. It was the press, however, that carried through the message of freedom at the end of the 1980s. Latvian newspapers vividly demonstrate that periodicals are not mere chroniclers of the passing scene. They can bring about or suppress the social and political change.

In the first years after regaining independence, retelling the political history of Latvia seemed the most urgent matter. Society and researchers alike rushed away from the Soviet lifestyle, culture, literature, art, fashion, and even cuisine as if they did not want to know about it ever again. Recently, however, researchers have once again begun to analyze the cultural heritage, literature, art, criticism, and everyday life of the Soviet era.

Moreover, since the early 1990s researchers in humanities were eager to adopt various theories and trends that, despite being widely-known and influential in Western world, were virtually unknown in the Soviet cultural setting. This includes a keen interest in history, from social and private history to contemporary folklore, the history and sociology of sexuality, gender studies, et cetera.

Interest in digitised periodicals is also on the rise, thanks to the rich, multilayered material periodicals can provide and the new browsing and searching possibilities of digitised materials. Recently a new, promising programme for history teachers was initiated, using the resources of the Latvian National Digital Library and Europeana to teach the history of Latvia and the world.

Impact Of The Europeana Newspapers Project
Europeana Newspapers will allow the NLL to process about 100 titles of periodicals, and to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to those titles. Most of these are from the early 20th century, which is also the time when the independent country of Latvia was born (Latvia became an independent country in 1918) and this in turn means that these periodicals will provide unique insight into the birth and development of modern-day Latvia.

The periodicals being contributed include both traditional, daily newspapers and official government-published collections of laws and orders. One of the most important newspapers provided is Jaunākās Ziņas (roughly translated as “The Most Recent News”). This was probably the most influential and widely read daily newspaper in 1930s Latvia.

Another important newspaper NLL will provide is Valdības Vēstnesis (translated as “The Government Herald”), which contains every law and order issued by Latvia’s government. Although only 3 years of this periodical will be processed (1918-1920), these are also the first 3 years of Latvia as an independent country.

Most of the newspapers provided by NLL will be in Latvian, but because of Latvia’s dynamic history at the beginning of 20th century, many newspapers will be in Russian and German as well.

These newspapers might be especially interesting to researchers of World War I and World War II as different ideological view-points on these topics will be represented.

One challenge of this digitisation work is the typeface. Many of the newspapers held by the NLL were published in Fraktur typeface, which has always been more challenging to process than Antiqua. However, the first samples of the NLL’s newspapers (processed at the University of Innsbruck) have resulted in a high-quality digital version (including OCR), even for the older texts.

You can see more images from the National Library of Latvia’s newspaper collection on the Europeana Newspapers Flickr stream.

University Library “Svetozar Markovic” is the oldest and largest university library in Serbia, and the central library of the University of Belgrade.

Our primary target groups are students, teachers and researchers, but we are open to all citizens. The rich library collection consists of scientific and special publications in all shapes and sizes, including electronic publications. Since we have a multitude of content to offer offline, we decided to digitise and create online accessible collections available to users worldwide. The Europeana Newspapers Project has opened the gates for us and helped us to push our serial collections into the digital world.

The Importance of Newspapers
It is never easy to recognize the true importance of newspapers from their official definition that often refers to the form and frequency of publishing. However, if we take a look at the content, it illustrates all segments of human life throughout decades. Newspapers are a mirror of everyday life, current events in society, politics, economy, culture and arts, as well as scientific achievements. As a matter of fact, libraries in Serbia opened their doors during the first half of 19^th century as reading rooms for – guess what? Serial publications!

The University Library in Belgrade is proud to be part of the Europeana Newspapers Project because it gives us a chance to highlight the milestones in various fields of social and scientific development in Serbia before the 2^nd World War.

 The overall importance of the project consists of giving the users a richer version of historical events, quality digitised material for scientific research or just general information, plus an easy and accessible way to search through the collections. In addition, the project will provide a full-text search facility for many of its newspapers and this is has so far been greatly challenging to achieve, especially when it comes to old newspapers written in Cyrillic.

 Our Role in the Project
As a partner in the project, the University Library in Belgrade will deliver 408,000 digitised pages of Serbian newspapers and journals published before 1945. When choosing newspapers that fit the project’s goals, we were driven by the accessibility, a level of preservation and some technical limitations.

We wanted to digitise the titles for which all issues are available in our collection, so that the information they provided would be comprehensive. Some of the digitised newspapers are especially important as they were published during World War I  (eg. Illustrated War Chronicles, Balkans War in Pictures and Words, War Journal and Official War Gazette) and thus complement nicely the project Europeana Collections 1914-1918.

We also chose various newspapers that help illustrate literary achievements from the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century. They include Strazilovo, Dawn, Sumadinka, New Spark and Podunavka.

To complete the picture, we added some of the most famous newspapers that are political and satirical, such as Bodljikavo Prase, Starmali, Starmladi, and those offering general information on everyday life: Srpsko Kolo, Belgrade Municipality Newspapers, Sunday, Star and Small Newspapers.

Digitisation Challenges
A huge challenge for the digitisation of old Serbian newspapers is the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that will be provided for 408,000 pages. We are currently wrapping up work on the first 200,000 pages and expect to have the first results of our work later this month. Tests that were conducted earlier in Austria showed a high level of text recognition. This is a huge success since OCR for newspapers in Cyrillic, especially the early versions, is quite a challenge!

Workshop
In addition to our technical work, the University Library in Belgrade is also hosting the first of three workshops related to the Europeana Newspapers Project. It will take place on 13-14 June, 2013 in Belgrade and is intended for all partners and groups involved in the project, as well as all interested librarians. The participants will learn more about OCR, NER, instruments for evaluation of the techniques used and quality assessment. Most importantly, they will exchange experiences and identify possible solutions for the challenges we all face in the project.

Pictures with courtesy of the University Library of Belgrade:

Ad Bar-Lock typewriter, ad Singer sewing machines, Balkan war in pictures and words,  Stramladi satirical gazette, Voice of the people: Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic