All things must come to an end eventually – even the Europeana Newspapers project. The good news is that in every end, there is also a new beginning. But more on this later.
After 38 months of hard, but also very fun and rewarding work with our network, the project has officially come to a close in March 2015. But as usual with such endeavours, there are still many activities which go on beyond the lifetime of the project, such as reporting and reviewing, disseminating and spreading the results as well as fostering takeup and new initiatives around the use and exploitation of said outcomes.
And there are many valuable outcomes of the project – more than 20 million historic newspaper pages are now discoverable via Europeana, and close to 12 million pages are fully searchable in The European Library, thanks to the large-scale refinement work undertaken during the project. 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.
Europeana Newspapers has not only created a massive resource of easily accessible historical news, but also produced several handy tools for the exploitation and enrichement of digital newspapers, together with standards and best practices for collection holders that are aiming to provide their historical newspaper assets in similar ways.
Together, all these resources have really pushed the state-of-the-art of newspaper digitisation and presentation in Europe. And so here it comes: Europeana are 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. Make sure to follow us here and on social media to be amongst the first to hear about this.
Meanwhile, 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!
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