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Using Digital Technologies to unlock history for researchers.

Rose Holley – Manager Newspaper Digitisation Program

Australian Academy of the Humanities Symposium: Humanities Futures

16 November 2007, Griffith University, Brisbane

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Status of the ProgramNovember 2006 Minister for Arts and

Sports approval

Budget approval -$8 million for 3 million pages over 4 years

Signed contracts with digitisation suppliers

April 2007 program pilot phase commences

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Process in briefNational sourcing of selected newspaper microfilm masters.

Masters scanned by W & F Pascoe, Sydney to tiff files.

NLA perform quality assurance, add metadata.

Apex Publishing, India process tiff files - OCR, zoning, xml markup.

NLA QA files, ingest to system, create derivatives for delivery.

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Content and CoverageNational Content

Initially a title from each state

Focus on major titles from each state first

Anticipated that ‘regional’ titles may be contributed later

Coverage: published between 1803 – 1954

(out of copyright)

West Australian

Northern Territory Times

Courier Mail

Advertiser Sydney Gazette

Argus

Mercury

Canberra Times

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First Newspaper

• First page of first Australian newspaper ever published

The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser

Saturday March 5 1803

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Through 150 years

• Up to 1954 (when Copyright applies), and later if agreement with publishers.

The Argus 22 August 1945

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Progress

• IT Infrastructure implemented and software developed (NLA)

• Pilot phase ongoing: digitisation of newspapers and conversion into full text (Contractors)

• Development of search and delivery system (NLA)

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Digital Newspaper Searching

• Newspapers full text searchable

• Image captions searchable

• Search across multiple papers e.g. by persons name.

• Refine searching by:– Date– Newspaper title– State published

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Browsing and Viewing

• Browse papers page by page

• Zoom in and out of image – to read small text– to view context of article within page layout

• Print article or entire page or issue

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Zoom technology

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Refine search by categories

• News• Advertising• Birth Death Marriage notices• Obituaries• Editorial commentary and letters• Shipping News• Arts and leisure• Detailed lists, results, guides

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Search Illustrations

Categorised as:

• Photo

• Cartoon

• Map

• Graph

• Illustration

Captions searchable

Canberra Times 26 July 1928 page 6

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Other features

Possibilities under consideration:

• OCR correction by users

• Personal annotation of articles by users

• Tagging results

• Clustering results

• Searching across other relevant resources (paid subscription services, international resources, other digital resources)

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Relationship - ANPLANWebsite: http://www.nla.gov.au/anplan/

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National Help• NLA working with State and Territory

Libraries as part of ANPLAN.

• Libraries suggest titles and dates and provide microfilm for digitising.

• ANPLAN members and other stakeholders will provide feedback on the search and delivery prototype.

• Developing model for national contribution of regional newspapers.

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Keep Up to Date with Progress• Website: http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/

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