
After 38 months of hard, but also very fun and rewarding work, the Europeana Newspapers project has officially come to a close in March 2015. LIBER was one of the proud participants in this project, leading Work Package 6 ‘Dissemination and Exploitation’. The Europeana Newspapers project has really pushed the state-of-the-art of newspaper digitisation and presentation in Europe. It passed its final review with flying colours, with all work packages ‘exceeding expectations and surpassing targets’ and the overall project rated ‘EXCELLENT‘!
Project Achievements
In those 38 months, Europeana Newspaper has achieved that:
– More than 20 million historic newspaper pages are now discoverable via Europeana
– Close to 12 million pages are fully searchable in The European Library
– In terms of volume and functionality, the EuropeanaNewspapers portal can proudly compare itself with other major international newspapers digitisation programmes such as Chronicling America in the US, or the Australian Trove.
– The project has created standards and best practices for collection holders that are aiming to provide their historical newspaper assets in similar ways.
– The project has developed a number of free and open source software tools. These tools can help libraries and other institutions to refine their digitised historical newspapers and to evaluate the quality of the refinement. All software tools can be found at the project website and also at GitHub.
Let the Exploring Begin
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. We invite everyone to take a dive in the news history of Europe!
Final Report Special Issue
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. Read it, and share it!
Dedicated Europeana Newspaper Channel in 2016
And, the work on European newspapers does not stop here. Europeana is 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. Follow Europeana online to be the first to hear about this: