Join us from Thursday 22 June 2017 to Friday 23 June 2017 in the Europeana Transcribathon Campus Berlin 2017 at the Berlin State Library!

The goal of this two-day challenge is to make documents from the First World War more accessible. We need your help to transcribe and annotate letters, diaries and newspapers from the projects Europeana 1914-1918 and Europeana Newspapers.

The event is made up of two main elements:

• Transcribathon challenge (German/English): Participants will be grouped into cross-generational teams who compete with each other to transcribe historical sources on www.transcribathon.eu. Starting in the afternoon of Thursday 22 June, the teams have 28 hours to transcribe as much text as they can and present their results to an international jury on the following day. Our team members will assist them during the competition.
• Workshops (English): Visitors can take part in transcription and data enrichment workshops on
• Friday 23 June. These include workstations for transcription, annotation, geo-tagging, Linked Open Data and Wikimedia/Wikisource and offer the possibility to discuss with experts.

Throughout the event there will be a number of activities that participants can join, including talks, a panel discussion and a Transcribathon party! Sign-up to this exciting opportunity by 14 June 2017 and join us in the enrichment of fascinating historical sources in an international environment! Register for free via Eventbrite here and find out more about the Campus Berlin event here.

Europeana Transcribathon Campus Berlin 2017 is organised by Europeana, Facts & Files and the Berlin State Library, in cooperation with the German Digital Library and Wikimedia.

For questions please contact team@transcribathon.eu.

All things must come to an end eventually – even the Europeana Newspapers project. The good news is that in every end, there is also a new beginning. But more on this later.

After 38 months of hard, but also very fun and rewarding work with our network, the project has officially come to a close in March 2015. But as usual with such endeavours, there are still many activities which go on beyond the lifetime of the project, such as reporting and reviewing, disseminating and spreading the results as well as fostering takeup and new initiatives around the use and exploitation of said outcomes.

And there are many valuable outcomes of the project – more than 20 million historic newspaper pages are now discoverable via Europeana, and close to 12 million pages are fully searchable in The European Library, thanks to the large-scale refinement work undertaken during the project. There are already some great examples of how this vast corpus can be utilised in research, or in the development of new services and applications. Nevertheless, with a collection of this size, the majority of it still needs to be explored and there are certainly many treasures buried within that yet remain to be discovered.

Europeana Newspapers has not only created a massive resource of easily accessible historical news, but also produced several handy tools for the exploitation and enrichement of digital newspapers, together with standards and best practices for collection holders that are aiming to provide their historical newspaper assets in similar ways.

Together, all these resources have really pushed the state-of-the-art of newspaper digitisation and presentation in Europe. And so here it comes: Europeana are already working on an exciting new development – a dedicated Europeana Newspaper channel will be launched in 2016! A new look and feel, more scalable servers, and possibly even more newspaper content are already in the pipeline. Make sure to follow us here and on social media to be amongst the first to hear about this.

Meanwhile, to encourage everyone to dive into all the rich resources delivered by Europeana Newspapers, we have summarised the main project results in a restyled special issue of our Final Report!

Today, the National Library of the Faroe Islands publicly opened the digital archive containing nearly all the faroese newspapers and selected periodica as open access. www.tidarrit.fo

The archive contains 38 titles and roughly 500.000 pages going from 1852 until 1999.

The project has been realized as a part of the digital strategy of the Faroese National Library to digitize and give access to the rich faroese cultural heritage.

Text and images kindly provided by Erling Kjærbo, National Library of the Faroese Islands

The Europeana Cloud project is seeking researchers who are interested in innovative ways of working and researching with historic newspapers. Those interested can fill out this form and more details are available below.

What can be analysed?

Image credit: Das Interessante Blatt, 18 September 1919. National Library of Austria.

Via the Europeana Newspapers project a corpus of newspapers drawn from the digitised collections of over 20 libraries in Europe has been created. This corpus includes over 10 million pages of OCR’d full text and images, and metadata records relating to several million more issues. Much of the data is in the public domain and available for re-use.

How will we do this?

Work Package 3 of Europeana Cloud contains many developers and human-computer interaction experts. These experts now wish to work with digital humanities or social sciences researchers to build services and tools that exploit this data and help answer research questions that cannot practically be researched without the technology. For example:

• What is the typical sentiment in the reporting of different papers on specific historical events?
• To which locations are historical protagonists tied in the reporting and how does this evolve over time?

How can I take part?

Europeana Cloud has already built similar tools for early modern philosophers and musicologists. If you or your research group is interested in doing the same for historic newspapers, please fill in this short form (10 lines maximum).

See more at: http://pro.europeana.eu/get-involved/projects/project-list/europeana-cloud/europeana-cloud-blog/wanted-historic-newspaper-researchers

It was the tenth and final Information day organised by partners of the Europeana Newspapers Project.

The event was attended by a large audience: 88 people in total, among them researchers, librarians, digital content providers, cultural heritage professionals, IT specialists, archivists, audio-visual professionals and teachers.

The speakers at the Information day were equally diverse. Thanks to them, the audience learnt more about many aspects of the project and its possible applications. The day was also an opportunity for those within the project to gather more information on the expectations of researchers with regard to digitised historic newspapers.

The day was made up of three parts.

Round Table #1: Why Europeana Newspapers?

Moderated by Elisabeth Freyre from the BnF, this first round table set the scene for the rest of the day through three presentations, which gave a detailed view of the project, its activities and goals.

The first presentation from Philippe Mezzasalma, Head of the Press department at the Department of Law, Economics and Politics at the BnF, was entitled The digitised newspapers collections at BnF: success and limits of the first historic newspaper digitisation work. It focused on how the BnF became involved in Europeana Newspapers. See the slides.

The second presentation from Hans-Jörg Lieder, Head of the department of bibliographic services at the Berlin State Library, reminded participants of the scale of the Europeana Newspapers project. See the slides.

Ioannis Anagnotopoulos, Coordinating manager of the Europeana Newspapers project at the BnF, set out the contribution of the BnF to the project. See the slides.

He noted that Europeana Newspapers had:

• Enabled the aggregation of historical European newspapers;
• Raised visibility of the Europeana portal and of the portals of partner libraries;
• Brought in a notable improvement of search features, thanks to the semantic enhancement of the data and metadata relating to the selected corpus.

Round Table #2: Technical innovation helping users

The aim of the second part of the morning session, moderated by Jean-Philippe Moreux from the BnF, was to take an in-depth look at the technical innovations of the project.

Günter Mühlberger, Professor and project director at the University of Innsbruck, the university responsible for processing the 8 million pages of the Europeana Newspapers project using OCR presented How can Optical Character Recognition technology help users in their research? See the slides.

Claus Gravenhorst, Director of strategy at CCS (the company which has processed 2 million pages of the project using OLR from 5 partner libraries), then explain the work done by CCS on OLR via his presentation Optical Layout Recognition: From unstructured to structured newspaper data. See the slides.

Clemens Neudecker, Coordinator of the Europeana Newspapers project at the Berlin State Library, then presented Development of Named Entities Recognition for French Newspapers. See the slides.

Alaa Abi Haidar, Researcher in data mining and complex systems at the BnF and the LiP6 laboratory, rounded off this session with a presentation that focused further on the purpose and applications of Named Entity Recognition. See the slides.

Round Table #3: What are the uses, practices, and expectations for the users?

With the afternoon session, the focus was put on the use of the digitised corpus in the project and the expectations of users. The session was moderated by Marc Minon, director of Cairn which is a platform for French-speaking periodicals.

This round table aimed to explore how the digital environment has changed the work methodologies of researchers, and to show what role Europeana Newspapers can play in this changing environment through the experience of the following speakers:

• Laurent Martin, Professor and lecturer at institutions such as the University of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, researcher at the Integration and Cooperation laboratory for European environments (ICEE) and member of the History Committee of the Ministry of Culture;
• Philippe Tétart, Senior lecturer in History (University of Maine), researcher and expert consultant to the National Sports Museum;
• Sophie Kurkdjian, Doctor of History at the University of Paris I, researcher working with the BnF and associate researcher with the IHTP-CNRS;
• Olivier Hamon, engineer and specialist in web semantics, working in the research and development unit of the company Syllabs.

All attendees received promotional materials, including a leaflet about the project and a promotional postcard printed with a French newspaper. Both were provided in French.

Overall, the day was rated a success by those who attended. A survey circulated after the event showed that over 90% of participants rated the presentations as Good or Very Good, and said they intended to explore the content made available by the project.

The event was mainly aimed at a French speaking audience and a translation service from English to French was available. The whole event was also recorded on video and will shortly be made available on the BnF website.

The day was publicised via a press release, activity on social media and a leaflet in Estonian. Additionally, an eight-page newspaper was put together by the ENP project team, using the content from old newspapers.

Just prior to the Information Day, the NLE was able to import 100,000 pages of newspaper content into its local newspaper portal dea.digar.ee. At the same time, 48,464 pages of Estonian content were imported to the Europeana Newspapers project’s own content browser. This meant that plenty of issues were available to show people at the Information Day.

Besides introducing the content itself, the audience was also informed about the project itself, the technical background such as why it is important to digitise historic newspapers (eg. poor condition, microfilming problems) and how these factors influence the result of techniques such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Optical Layout Recognition (OLR).

All of the talks contributed towards the four main objectives of the Information Day, which were to:

• Increase the overall awareness of the Europeana Newspapers project;
• Raise interest in historic newspapers in general;
• Introduce the availability and free access of the project’s results in the NLE’s local newspaper portal, in the project’s content browser and on Europeana;
• Promote the importance of digitisation, explain the techniques of OCR and OLR, to find volunteers to contribute via crowdsourcing (correcting the text after automated OCR while reading the old newspapers).

A well-known and very popular voice from Estonian Broadcasting News editorial, Märt Treier, was asked to moderate the event. The day was opened by the NLE’s Director General, Janne Andresoo.

The first speaker, Kristel Veimann — project manager of NLE’s newspapers portal and team member of the Europeana Newspapers project — spoke about the newspaper collection, digitisation process, the current situation and future plans related to the NLE’s own newspapers portal.

The second speaker was Ragne Kõuts, Scientist, Professor of University of Tartu, Faculty of Social Sciences and Education (Journalism, Communication Management). The presentation was titled Newspapers – to whom and why?

The third presentation —Newspapers and Family History Research — was about the issues of genealogists. Presented by Fred Puss, Researcher and Head of the Estonian Biographical Center.

The fourth presentation — Newspapers’ Role: From Early Patriotic Mind, the Estonian Age of Awakening to the Aspiration of National Statehood — was from one of the most well known people in Estonian journalism, Krista Aru. Krista Aru is someone who is always eagerly anticipated as a speaker, so it was an honour to have her at this Information Day.

The fifth presentation was made by the historian Aadu Must and was entitled Hidden Treasures Coming Out from Digitised Newspapers.

Krista Kiisa, project manager of the Europeana Newspapers project within the NLE, gave an overview about the objectives of the project, revealed technical details and explained the partners’ tasks and workflow of the project. Guidance was also given about where and how users could search European newspapers in The Europeana Library portal and in Europeana.

After the Europeana Newspapers presentation, an active discussion took place on the topic of how newspapers in different languages could be made understandable to other language-speakers, including the role of tools such as Google-translate in helping readers with this task.

The Information Day finished with a 10-minute long movie, dedicated to newspapers and made by the NLE’s Digitisation Department. That was followed by an excursion to Digitisation Department, where a live demonstration of the scanning, processing, OCR and segmentation of newspapers was given.

Most of the audience had no or very few information about the resources available in TEL and Europeana before the event and the need for such a day was obvious. Even an hour after the official end of the event, there were still people in the coffee corner, vividly discussing the issues related to newspapers!

The programme was tailored to attract end-users coming from backgrounds as diverse as the topics in a newspaper issue itself. Besides attendees from different Austrian universities and university libraries, teachers and students were welcomed at the event as well. Eight presentations were held throughout the Information Day, each highlighting another aspect of newspapers digitisation.

The Current State of Newspaper Digitisation
Hans-Jörg Lieder of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin not only introduced the Europeana Newspapers Project to the audience, but he also put the project into a wider perspective, examining the current state of newspaper digitisation. His conclusion that the present situation of newspaper digitisation is best illustrated by a photo taken shortly after the start of a marathon proved to be very thought provoking and was widely discussed.

His talk was followed by Christa Müller, head of the Austrian National Library’s digitisation department ‘Abteilung Digitale Services’. She focused on ANNO, the newspaper portal of the Austrian National Library. About 13 million newspaper pages are currently available online, of which about four million pages are searchable. Christa Müller also delivered insight into the selection process for digitisation and the planned functionalities of ANNO.

Günter Mühlberger of the University of Innsbruck, a technical project partner in Europeana Newspapers, gave an overview of the different stages involved in digitisation projects. While the emphasis was placed on technical aspects – OCR, quality of digital image, metadata – he also touched upon other areas such as the legal situation of historical newspapers or the archiving the digitised material.

Digitised, Historical Newspapers as a Source for Historical Research
After the coffee break two historians provided insights into their day to day work with digitised, historical newspapers.

Professor Oliver Rathkolb, who heads the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) at the University of Vienna, pointed out how he was able to utilise digitised, historical newspapers in his own research. He especially highlighted that he was now able to work more significantly more efficiently, and at the same time was able to find material that had until now been undiscovered.

Rathkolb also emphasised the importance of bringing more recent historical newspapers online, for example those relating to the period between the First and Second World War.

The following talk by Dr Marie-Theres Arnbom — a freelance historian, author, curator and cultural manager — outlined how the portal ANNO helped her research using the example of a biography. She chose Victor Léon, a librettist, to illustrate how she was able to find details about his life she would have never discovered. She said that with the help of such portals as ANNO it is possible to reconstruct a whole life.

Both speakers cooperated with the Austrian National Library to digitise additional material. This shows that the relationship between memory institutions and researchers can be fruitful for both sides. Seeing how digitised material was used in actual research sparked great interest within the audience.

The Versatility of Digitised, Historic Newspapers
Lunch was followed by three talks – all diverse in content but oriented on practical aspects.

Clemens Neudecker of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin investigated the problems but also opportunities when using digitised newspapers as a base for research in Digital Humanities. He pointed out that a term such as ‘Big Data’ is also relative. After all, only an estimated four percent of European holdings have been digitised so far.

His talk was followed by Eva Maria Naimer. She shared her experiences of employing digitised newspapers in secondary school teaching – an especially exciting application of the content made available through newspaper portals. Eva Maria Naimer showed how different topics, such as censorship and the changing image of women can be illustrated by examples of newspaper articles. The following lively discussion engaged in topics such as if really all content should be made available to students – a topic which has seldom been discussed in connection with newspapers digitisation so far.

Martin Schaller, who held the last talk at the Information Day, gave an overview of different online newspaper portals, highlighting especially the content browser developed within the project.

Following the last presentation, the audience had the possibility for an in-depth discussion of their questions in three more informal Q&A sessions.

Key messages of the Information Day
The Information Day was well received amongst participants. The talks emphasising the use of digitised newspapers were especially heavily debated, sparking interesting questions and further contemplation. The relevant examples highlighting how this source is actually utilised, not only in historical research but in teaching as well, gave the audience an impression of its versatility. However, newspaper digitisation is only in its beginnings and more work, especially in increasing the results of Optical Character Recognition or introducing Named Entity Recognition, needs to be done. To use Hans-Jörg Lieder’s metaphor mentioned in his talk: The starting shot just faded away, now we need to keep going.

The event was covered in social media, especially on Twitter. Tweets #eurnewsVIE show comments on talks.

On Tuesday 28 October 2014, the Europeana Newspapers Information Day took place at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in the Hague.

Among our audience were over 40 librarians, archivists, representatives of educational and cultural institutions, as well as professional and amateur researchers; in short, a diverse group of end users interested in historical newspapers. The audience was very active, which led to interesting discussions throughout the day.

The programme included presentations about the digital newspaper collection of the KB, about the Europeana Newspaper project in general and about the newspaper browser by The European Library in particular. Moreover, two academic researchers presented their approach to newspapers as a source of historical information and what they thought was the added value of combining the European newspapers in one portal.

Presentations

The Information day was opened by Dr. Els Van Eijck Van Heslinga, the KB’s Director of business operations.

She introduced the Europeana Newspaper project and made clear that participating in these type of projects is very important for research libraries such as the KB and adds value to their collections. Moreover, she made clear how the new browser (accessible through The European Library) which was developed within the project, made it so much easier and attractive to do transnational comparative research.

The next presentation was by Huibert Crijns, Collections specialist at the KB. He described the efforts of the KB in digitizing Dutch language newspapers residing in a large number of institutions in the Netherlands. The collection of digitised content is available through Delpher.

Dr. Samuël Kruizinga, embedded researcher at the KB and Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Amsterdam, made clear how he makes use of historical newspapers in his current research project, which focuses on the memory of the First World War in the Netherlands. He pointed out that newspapers are a rich source of information, because they contain all kind of ’hard’ data such as financial, legal, commercial and social information as well as information about ‘public opinion’. Kruizinga further stressed that it remains crucial to establish the position of a certain newspaper and its readers to be able to interpret its content.

Dr. Pim Huijnen, Postdoctoral researcher in the Translantis project at Utrecht University, proceeded by illuminating the ’digital turn’ in humanities research. He clarified some of the practical aspects of using digital resources and the ’bottom-up’ approach, i.e. browsing large full-text corpora by means of keywords. Pim Huijnen pointed out that the method of ’distant reading’, typical for digital humanities and increasingly popular because of the availability of large digital collections, is not enough in itself to answer humanities research questions. However, the use of online newspapers collections such as Europeana Newspapers offers great opportunities to start looking for patterns and developments over time or within different geographical areas.

Lotte Wilms, Project leader European Projects at the KB and Work package leader for Europeana Newspapers, gave a detailed description of the work performed within the Europeana Newspapers project. She explained the process of aggregation and the different tasks related to refinement.

Marieke Willems, Communication Officer EU Projects at LIBER, presented the newspaper browser which was developed within the project and is now available through The European Library. She gave a live demo of the browser and performed a number of queries to show the opportunities for end users.

See http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers for the browser.

Results

The Information day provided us with a great opportunity to actually talk to our (potential) end users and hear about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. During and after the presentations, the participants gave their feedback, questions and comments to the speakers. The most important outcomes of these interactive sessions were:

• Users would be happy to find documentation on the functionality and options of the browser on The European Library’s website
• Users would like to see search functionality and downloading options to be further developed
• The aggregated content could be made available through an API to be usable in a virtual research environment. This aspect is relevant especially for digital humanities researchers, who will then be able to use their own tools on the data
• The Europeana Newspapers collection could be even more attractive for teachers if more specific functionality is provided to allow for educational usage

It was an inspiring afternoon and we are very happy with the recommendations provided by the participants.

The official report is available here.

The third press release of the Europeana Newspapers Project tells you all about the historic newspaper browser:

As part of the Europeana Newspapers project, The European Library developed a historic newspapers browser that enables users to perform full-text searches in millions of historic newspaper pages.

“For the first time in history we have the opportunity to do transnational comparative research on the basis of big data!“ says Toine Pieters, digital humanities researcher from the University of Utrecht.

The prototype interface has undergone usability testing in spring 2014. On the basis of the recommendations received, The European Library simplified the search page and made it possible to browse the content by date, newspaper title and geographic map. Before the end of the project a further usability study will be carried out to test the improvements made. While the amount of content in the browser continues to grow rapidly one can already explore 1.8 million historic newspaper issues and perform full-text searches across 7 million pages. By the end of January 2015, the browser will contain around 30 million newspaper pages from 25 libraries in 23 European countries. Users will be able to search:

• full text of more than 10 million historic newspaper pages
• named entity recognition in Dutch, German and French to enable searches of names of people and geographic places
• metadata records of over 20 million historic newspaper pages.

“Having access to newspapers from across Europe….allows us to look for circulation, not only for origins: to study routes rather than roots, to work on what we call transliteratures.” says Amélia Sanz, researcher and professor of comparative literature and cyber culture at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Moreover one can explore the historic newspapers as well as millions of other cultural heritage items at Europeana.eu, which recently embedded the historic newspaper viewer. The viewer is also available through The European Library for other cultural heritage institutions to embed in their digital environment.

“For researchers, such as historians, journalists, fact-checkers and genealogists, Europeana Newspapers will be the most important portal to consult historic newspapers in Europe. A source of great importance in construction.“ says Eric Hennekam, archive specialist, member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and visiting lecturer at the faculty of journalism of the University of Groningen, VU University Amsterdam and the Flemish Mediacademy.

Historic newspaper content from the following libraries is available and constantly growing:

• National Library of France
• National Library of the Netherlands
• Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library
• National Library of Estonia
• National Library of Finland
• National Library of Latvia
• National Library of Poland
• National Library of Turkey
• Austrian National Library
• Berlin State Library
• State and University Library Hamburg
• University Library of Belgrade
• National Library of Wales
• National Library of Bulgaria
• National Library of Czech Republic
• National and University Library in Zagreb
• National Library of Belgium
• National and University Library of Slovenia
• National Library of Portugal
• National Library of Romania
• National and Univeristy Library Iceland
• National Library of Spain
• National Library of Luxembourg
• National Library of Slovakia
• National Library of Serbia

Contact: Clemens Neudecker: clemens.neudecker@europeana-newspapers.eu

Official Press Release

Translations: French, German

The Europeana Newspapers project develops and shares software tools for libraries and other cultural heritage organisation to use.

1. PRImA research developed quality assessment tools for refinement of digitised historic newspapers that are now available open source on Github.
2. The National Library of the Netherlands developed a tool for named entity recognition in digitised newspapers that is now available open source on Github.
3. The University of Innsbruck developed a tool for editing and annotating METS/ALTO with structural information. Get the Structify tool here.

Find out more about the specific tools provided on our new Tools overview page, or watch our website for a series of blog posts introducing the tools more in depth.