A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “Europeana Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service.

The Europeana Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. In addition, the project addresses challenges particularly linked with digitized newspapers:

• use of refinement methods for OCR, OLR/article segmentation, and named entity recognition (NER), and page class recognition to enhance search and presentation functionalities for Europeana customers,
• quality evaluation for automatic refinement technologies,
• transformation of local metadata to the Europeana Data Model (EDM)
• metadata standardization in close collaboration with stakeholders from the public and private sector.

Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana Collections 1914-1918 project.

The project has started on 1st February 2012. The kick-off meeting of all partners of the project will take place on 1st – 2nd March 2012 in Berlin, hosted by the project leader – The Berlin State Library.