Connecting to the past: Newspaper digitization in the Nordic countries

Abstract

Digital newspaper projects are a hot topic around the world. One pioneer in the field of digitizing newspapers is the Nordic TIDEN project, launched in 2001. Today the amount of online pages has risen from 400,000 at launch to 1.6 million. In Finland and Sweden, full text search is available. The Historical Newspaper Library in Finland is highly regarded among researchers and the public. It is easy to use in its Google-like approach. The users are connected to places, questions, nations and human life over centuries. The process of digitizing newspapers includes microfilming, digitization and optical character recognition, identification and database import. The speed and automation of the production environment is essential. The automated processes of today offer the coordinates to each word in the paper and the users get better service as the words are highlighted. Images are of a better quality as grayscale images can be handled automatically. In digital futures, the digital collection management will be an exciting challenge. The infrastructure is changing fast as well as the expectations. We have to improve access in various ways, including automatic translation to old holdings and meeting places for users: connecting them to each other and to holdings in other heritage sectors. Newspaper collections are targets that have a great demand on the internet from researchers as well as the public at large. Our digitized historical newspaper collections and the born digital ones are connecting the users to places, questions, nations and human life over centuries. Incidents from the past are suddenly easily accessible. The past is living in the present.Journal of Digital Asset Management (2006) 2, 168–171. doi:10.1057/palgrave.dam.3650027 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]