The Europeana Newspapers ProjectA Gateway to European Newspapers Online

Aleš Pekárek, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER)

Cyberspace 2012, Brno, Czech Republic, 1.12.2012

2

Content

• Aims• Consortium• Structure• Areas of activity• Project communication & channels

3

Why newspapers?

„Newspapers are the second hand of history“

Arthur Schopenhauer

„Newspapers are one of the most popular material types in our library, because they are so rich with information and thus appeal to such a wide range of people. Adding 2 million of our digitised newspaper pages to Europeana Newspapers provides users with a more elaborate experience and we are very happy to offer them this chance.“

Lily Knibbeler, Head of the Marketing & Services of the National Library of the Netherlands

• Relevant to all citizens

• Highly relevant to European policies incl. Europeana

4

Aims & Objectives

1) Selection, Refinement & Aggregation of content• Make Europeana the largest provider of pan-European newspaper collections• Provision of more than 18 million newspaper pages to Europeana, many of

those with full-texts2) Analysis of existing newspaper collections• Survey of newspaper holdings in Europe3) Quality Assurance & Best practice recommendations• Contribute to optimised workflows and data aggregation infrastructures• Provide best practice recommendations for digitization, refinement,

workflows, metadata etc. and evaluation tools4) Presentation and full-text search• Improve access to newspaper collections within Europeana

5

Consortium & Stakeholders

• 17 partners from 12 countries within the consortium• National libraries• University libraries• SME

• External partners and stakeholders:• Involvement of libraries outside the project consortium

• Framework:• funded as a Best Practice Network in the ICT-PSP programme of

the European Commission• Project Duration: February 2012 – January 2015

Europeana Newspapers Consortium

NLF

SBBONB

NLP

BnF

NLE

SUB HH

USAL

NLL

KB

LIBER

CCS

NLT

UB

UIBK

LFT

BL

TEL

Consortium Partners

9. University of Salford10. CCS Content ConversionSpecialists GmbH11. Stichting LIBER12. National Library of Latvia13. National Library of Turkey14. University Library of Belgrade15. University of Innsbruck16. Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Tessmann17. The British Library

1. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (project co-ordinator)2. National Library of theNetherlands3. National Library of Estonia4. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek5. National Library of Finland6. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg7. Bibliothèque nationale de France8. National Library of Poland

Project Structure

• Work Package 1: Coordination and Management• Berlin State Library (SBB)

• Work Package 2: Refinement of digitised newspapers• National Library of the Netherlands (KB)

• Work Package 3: Evaluation and Quality Assessment• University of Salford (USAL)

• Work Package 4: Aggregation and presentation of digitisednewspapers for Europeana

• The European Library (TEL)

• Work Package 5: Metadata best practice recommendations• University of Innsbruck (UIBK)

• Work Package 6: Dissemination and Exploitation• Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER)

WP 1: Coordination and Management

• Project administration• management of all financial and organisational commitments

• Financial control• Project communication

• provide infrastructure for internal communication• Project quality assurance

• monitoring, evaluation, and reporting of results based on definedcriteria

• Risk management• avoid conflicts inside the Consortium

WP 2: Refinement of digitised newspapers

• Analyse and select available digital newspaper collections

• Define digitisation requirements and minimum quality of newspapers

• Coordinate refinement of selected content provided bylibraries

• Provide recommendations on best practices for refinement of digitised newspaper collections

WP2: Refinement of digitised newspapers – OCR and OLR

• 8 million pages “as is”• 10 million refined pages:

OCR (UIBK, Austria)• 2 million refined pages:

OCR/OLR (article segmentation)(CCS, Germany)

• UIBK enriches the OCR with structural informationfrom their Document Understanding Platform

• CCS produces OCR and verification of columnrecognition, zoning, article segmentation, and pageclass recognition

• CCS provides libraries with a client technology formanual correction of recognition and segmentationresults

CCS: Column recognition, article segmentation

UIBK: Detection of headings, footnotes, etc. Table of contents extraction

WP 2: Refinement – Named Entity Recognition

• KB provides named entities recognition (NER) for material from up to three languages (Dutch, English, and German)

WP 3: Evaluation and Quality Assessment

• Use scenarios with evaluation profiles, datasets, ground truth, and evaluation tools

• Overview of usability, limitations and potential of existing material

• Identification of bottlenecks and recommendations forimprovements

• Evaluation of refinement processes carried out in WP2

• Recommendations for best practice in digitisation projects

WP 4: Aggregation and presentation for Europeana

• Identification and analysis of public and private digital newspaper collections across Europe

• Establish a realistic schedule for aggregation• Creation of a European registry for digitized newspapers• Recommendations how to align newspaper metadata to

EDM• Aggregate newspaper metadata from content providers• Creation of a full-text index of newspaper content• Development of a newspaper content browser

15

WP 4: Aggregation of content

• Aggregation of 18 million pages of digitisednewspapers to Europeana and to The European Library

• Metadata transformation to meet therequirements of the Europeana Data Model (EDM)

• Distribution of data to Europeana

www.europeana.eu/

www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/

WP 4: Presentation & Access to full-texts

• Within the lifetime of the project, a content browser will be built within TEL portal so that users can …

• Search full text, e.g. • by search term, • by named entities• by collections of newspapers• by date ….

• See newspaper images• Be linked to relevant library sources • This browser will be built in TEL during the

project; and exported to Europeana after the project

WP 5: Metadata best practice recommendations

• Analysis of metadata formats in use by libraries

• Align metadata models with the METS/ALTO standard and release best practise recommendations

• Usability of the recommendation will be tested through an evaluation cycle

• Provide recommendations on best practices for refinement of digitized newspaper collections for Europeana

18

WP 6: Dissemination

• Objectives• Establishment of publicity• Increasing usage of Europeana• Awareness raising among target groups

• Tasks1. Media Communication2. Workshops and conferences

• Three main dissemination workshops• National information days• Network extension

3. Exploitation

19

Main communication channels

WWW: http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/

Twitter: @eurnews

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanaNewspapers

Newsletter: http://bit.ly/TsoMpY (or at website - subscribe)

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/Europeana_Newspapers

Thanks for yourattention

pekarek.ales@gmail.com

www.europeana-newspapers.eu

www.libereurope.eu