The Hague, 26th of June 2012   

Launch of the Europeana Newspapers project

A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “Europeana Newspapers” project to, over the next 3 years, provide more than 18 million newspaper pages to the online service Europeana. Europeana is a single access point to millions of digitised books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records sourced from throughout Europe.

The Europeana Newspapers project is funded under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Program 2007-2013 of the European Commission with the aim of aggregation and refinement of newspaper content through The European Library.

Each library participating in the project will distribute digitised newspapers and full-text via Europeana. The project aims to make the newspaper content directly accessible for users through a special interface within the content browser. This will be integrated into the Europeana portal and will allow queries of phrases or single words within the newspapers’ texts. This goes far beyond the standard libraries catalogue search functions which usually allow the searching by date or title only.

The project addresses challenges linked with digitised newspapers such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Optical Layout Recognition (OLR), article segmentation and page class recognition, and named entity recognition (NER). OCR is the electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. OLR is concerned with the detection and separation of articles on a scanned page with more than one article. NER seeks to locate entities in the full text and to classify them according to standardised names for persons, locations, and organisations.

The project will also evaluate the quality of the refinement technologies and transform the local metadata into the Europeana Data Model standard in close collaboration with stakeholders from the public and private sector.

The Europeana Newspapers project is co-ordinated by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Follow the advancements of the Europeana Newspapers project at www.europeana-newspapers.eu. For any further information please contact Hans-Jörg Lieder or Thorsten Siegmann at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin via info@europeana-newspapers.eu. 

Project Partners:

BerlinState Library                                                            National Library of the Netherlands

National Library of Estonia                                              Austrian National Library

Universityof Helsinki, National Library of Finland       Hamburg State and University Library

National Library of France                                               National Library of Poland

CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH              LIBER Foundation

National Library of Latvia                                                 National Library of Turkey

Universityof Beograd                                                        University of Innsbruck

Dr. Friedrich Tessmann Library                                     The British Library

Universityof Salford                                                           The European Library

Europeana in a nutshell

Europeana is a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 23 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 2.200 content providers from across Europe.

www.europeana.eu

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