It was the tenth and final Information day organised by partners of the Europeana Newspapers Project.

The event was attended by a large audience: 88 people in total, among them researchers, librarians, digital content providers, cultural heritage professionals, IT specialists, archivists, audio-visual professionals and teachers.

The speakers at the Information day were equally diverse. Thanks to them, the audience learnt more about many aspects of the project and its possible applications. The day was also an opportunity for those within the project to gather more information on the expectations of researchers with regard to digitised historic newspapers.

The day was made up of three parts.

Round Table #1: Why Europeana Newspapers?

Moderated by Elisabeth Freyre from the BnF, this first round table set the scene for the rest of the day through three presentations, which gave a detailed view of the project, its activities and goals.

The first presentation from Philippe Mezzasalma, Head of the Press department at the Department of Law, Economics and Politics at the BnF, was entitled The digitised newspapers collections at BnF: success and limits of the first historic newspaper digitisation work. It focused on how the BnF became involved in Europeana Newspapers. See the slides.

The second presentation from Hans-Jörg Lieder, Head of the department of bibliographic services at the Berlin State Library, reminded participants of the scale of the Europeana Newspapers project. See the slides.

Ioannis Anagnotopoulos, Coordinating manager of the Europeana Newspapers project at the BnF, set out the contribution of the BnF to the project. See the slides.

He noted that Europeana Newspapers had:

• Enabled the aggregation of historical European newspapers;
• Raised visibility of the Europeana portal and of the portals of partner libraries;
• Brought in a notable improvement of search features, thanks to the semantic enhancement of the data and metadata relating to the selected corpus.

Round Table #2: Technical innovation helping users

The aim of the second part of the morning session, moderated by Jean-Philippe Moreux from the BnF, was to take an in-depth look at the technical innovations of the project.

Günter Mühlberger, Professor and project director at the University of Innsbruck, the university responsible for processing the 8 million pages of the Europeana Newspapers project using OCR presented How can Optical Character Recognition technology help users in their research? See the slides.

Claus Gravenhorst, Director of strategy at CCS (the company which has processed 2 million pages of the project using OLR from 5 partner libraries), then explain the work done by CCS on OLR via his presentation Optical Layout Recognition: From unstructured to structured newspaper data. See the slides.

Clemens Neudecker, Coordinator of the Europeana Newspapers project at the Berlin State Library, then presented Development of Named Entities Recognition for French Newspapers. See the slides.

Alaa Abi Haidar, Researcher in data mining and complex systems at the BnF and the LiP6 laboratory, rounded off this session with a presentation that focused further on the purpose and applications of Named Entity Recognition. See the slides.

Round Table #3: What are the uses, practices, and expectations for the users?

With the afternoon session, the focus was put on the use of the digitised corpus in the project and the expectations of users. The session was moderated by Marc Minon, director of Cairn which is a platform for French-speaking periodicals.

This round table aimed to explore how the digital environment has changed the work methodologies of researchers, and to show what role Europeana Newspapers can play in this changing environment through the experience of the following speakers:

• Laurent Martin, Professor and lecturer at institutions such as the University of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, researcher at the Integration and Cooperation laboratory for European environments (ICEE) and member of the History Committee of the Ministry of Culture;
• Philippe Tétart, Senior lecturer in History (University of Maine), researcher and expert consultant to the National Sports Museum;
• Sophie Kurkdjian, Doctor of History at the University of Paris I, researcher working with the BnF and associate researcher with the IHTP-CNRS;
• Olivier Hamon, engineer and specialist in web semantics, working in the research and development unit of the company Syllabs.

All attendees received promotional materials, including a leaflet about the project and a promotional postcard printed with a French newspaper. Both were provided in French.

Overall, the day was rated a success by those who attended. A survey circulated after the event showed that over 90% of participants rated the presentations as Good or Very Good, and said they intended to explore the content made available by the project.

The event was mainly aimed at a French speaking audience and a translation service from English to French was available. The whole event was also recorded on video and will shortly be made available on the BnF website.

On Tuesday 28 October 2014, the Europeana Newspapers Information Day took place at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in the Hague.

Among our audience were over 40 librarians, archivists, representatives of educational and cultural institutions, as well as professional and amateur researchers; in short, a diverse group of end users interested in historical newspapers. The audience was very active, which led to interesting discussions throughout the day.

The programme included presentations about the digital newspaper collection of the KB, about the Europeana Newspaper project in general and about the newspaper browser by The European Library in particular. Moreover, two academic researchers presented their approach to newspapers as a source of historical information and what they thought was the added value of combining the European newspapers in one portal.

Presentations

The Information day was opened by Dr. Els Van Eijck Van Heslinga, the KB’s Director of business operations.

She introduced the Europeana Newspaper project and made clear that participating in these type of projects is very important for research libraries such as the KB and adds value to their collections. Moreover, she made clear how the new browser (accessible through The European Library) which was developed within the project, made it so much easier and attractive to do transnational comparative research.

The next presentation was by Huibert Crijns, Collections specialist at the KB. He described the efforts of the KB in digitizing Dutch language newspapers residing in a large number of institutions in the Netherlands. The collection of digitised content is available through Delpher.

Dr. Samuël Kruizinga, embedded researcher at the KB and Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Amsterdam, made clear how he makes use of historical newspapers in his current research project, which focuses on the memory of the First World War in the Netherlands. He pointed out that newspapers are a rich source of information, because they contain all kind of ’hard’ data such as financial, legal, commercial and social information as well as information about ‘public opinion’. Kruizinga further stressed that it remains crucial to establish the position of a certain newspaper and its readers to be able to interpret its content.

Dr. Pim Huijnen, Postdoctoral researcher in the Translantis project at Utrecht University, proceeded by illuminating the ’digital turn’ in humanities research. He clarified some of the practical aspects of using digital resources and the ’bottom-up’ approach, i.e. browsing large full-text corpora by means of keywords. Pim Huijnen pointed out that the method of ’distant reading’, typical for digital humanities and increasingly popular because of the availability of large digital collections, is not enough in itself to answer humanities research questions. However, the use of online newspapers collections such as Europeana Newspapers offers great opportunities to start looking for patterns and developments over time or within different geographical areas.

Lotte Wilms, Project leader European Projects at the KB and Work package leader for Europeana Newspapers, gave a detailed description of the work performed within the Europeana Newspapers project. She explained the process of aggregation and the different tasks related to refinement.

Marieke Willems, Communication Officer EU Projects at LIBER, presented the newspaper browser which was developed within the project and is now available through The European Library. She gave a live demo of the browser and performed a number of queries to show the opportunities for end users.

See http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers for the browser.

Results

The Information day provided us with a great opportunity to actually talk to our (potential) end users and hear about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. During and after the presentations, the participants gave their feedback, questions and comments to the speakers. The most important outcomes of these interactive sessions were:

• Users would be happy to find documentation on the functionality and options of the browser on The European Library’s website
• Users would like to see search functionality and downloading options to be further developed
• The aggregated content could be made available through an API to be usable in a virtual research environment. This aspect is relevant especially for digital humanities researchers, who will then be able to use their own tools on the data
• The Europeana Newspapers collection could be even more attractive for teachers if more specific functionality is provided to allow for educational usage

It was an inspiring afternoon and we are very happy with the recommendations provided by the participants.

The official report is available here.

Enabling access to digitised historic newspapers

The information day aims to raise awareness of Europeana Newspapers and the value of collaboration to make historic newspapers content available online. There will be presentations from the UK partners in the Europeana Newspapers Project, The European Library and newspapers researchers.

There are a few tickets left (at the time of typing ), which can be booked through this link.

Programme

The information day will take place in British Library Conference Centre: Eliot Room

09:30 -10:00 Arrival and Registrations (refreshments)

10:00-10:10 Welcome and introduction to the day

10:10-10:30 News collections at the British Library (Dr Luke McKernan, British Library)

10:35-11:00 The British Newspaper Archive: Tales of the unexpected (Dr Ed King, Independent researcher)

11:10-11:40 Digital research and newspapers (Paul Gooding, Digital Preservation Coalition; Dr Ulrich Tiedau, University College London)

11:40-12:00 Welsh Newspapers Online (Alan Vaughan Hughes, National Library of Wales)

12:00-13:00 Lunch (provided)

13:00-13:30 Europeana Newspapers Project: an overview (Dr Rossitza Atanassova, British Library)

13:30-14:00 Europeana Newspapers browser (Alastair Dunning, The European Library)

14:00-14:30 Europeana Newspapers: evaluation and quality assessment (University of Salford)

14:30-15:00 Coffee break

15:00-16:00 Digitising and researching historic newspapers collections: panel discussion with Dr James Mussell, University of Leeds; Professor Lorna Hughes, University of Wales; DC Thomson Family History and others TBC

16:00 – End of the official programme

16:00-17:00 – Drinks and nibbles

Go here for the news-item of The British Library

The core aim of the Seminar was to present digital material regarding WWI and review the possibilities and limitations of using digital resources.

The Europeana Newspapers Project was presented by Ulrike Kölsch, who spoke about “Historical Newspapers in the Digital Age” and stressed the challenges and solutions in developing a cross-searchable newspaper browser, which will provide access to over 18 million digitized historical newspaper pages from 12 European libraries.

Further presentations concerned the practical aspects of using digital resources: Paulina Błaszczykiewicz discussed the content and functionalities of the Polish Digital National Library POLONA, and Kamil Śliwowski spoke about “Copyright in the digital world,” especially in the context of educational activities. A workshop, moderated by Magdalena Rud, was dedicated to the question “How to use the Digital National Library POLONA for school teaching,” and Ad Pollé and Frank Drauschke discussed the Europeana 1914-1918 crowdsourcing campaign and showed how public libraries could participate in it, in collaboration with local communities.

The seminar was attended by over 100 participants, mostly teachers, librarians, and historians, and sparked great interest. It was therefore a good opportunity to promote the Europeana Newspapers Project and other digitization activities of the National Library of Poland to a new audience. The event also allowed us to gain valuable feedback on the expectations and needs of an important target group of users.

Topics addressed are:

• Distant Reading: Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age.
• POLONA, the Digital National Library – content and functionalities.
• Copyright in the digital world.
• How to use the Digital National Library POLONA for school teaching.
• Europeana, UGC & you – A Europeana 1914-1918 crowdsourcing campaign in Poland.

Have a look at the detailed agenda here.

Information in Polish on the website of the National Library of Poland here.   

The discussion included two presentations: one on Europeana Newspapers Project and the other one on most popular ways readers use portal of digitized newspapers.

Presentations were followed by a discussion titled “Myths and reality” which aimed to uncover most popular misconceptions both readers and librarians have about digitisation. Myths discussed at the event included:

• Library is a book repository and should primarily and mainly digitise books
• Digital library is used only by younger generation or IT experts
• All of the content of digital library should be accessible to everyone free of charge
• OCRed texts actually are rewritten manually

During the event a quick questionnaire was made. Participants were asked to answer three questions:

1. Is a European-wide portal of digitised newspapers necessary or it would be a luxury. And how would you use it?
2. What content should National Library of Latvia digitise next?
3. Would a reasonable fee be used as means to allow users access copyright-protected content even from outside of Library? What would be a reasonable fee for such a service?

The general answers to these questions were:

1. Although many researchers prefer smaller collections, a European-wide portal of digitised newspapers is also necessary, because it lets you easily search for representation of the same events by periodicals of different countries. More than 90% of respondent’s answers were positive. Moreover many of them represent opinion a European-wide portal of digitised newspapers provide access to common knowledge of history and therefore the question we made is out of discussion as we long ceased not discuss necessity of theaters, concerts and culture events.
2. Because National Library of Latvia has mostly digitised central press so far, it would be important to digitise regional periodicals as well.
3. A reasonable fee would indeed be a good solution to allow users access copyright-protected content. About half of all respondents said that 5-7 EUR/month would be a reasonable fee with discount for yearly subscriptions. Other half of respondents stated that fee per-view or per-article would be the correct method to charge for access to copyright-protected content.

The Information day was an excellent opportunity to hear what our readers think about our digitisation initiatives so far and some improvements to our portals will be done based on their suggestions.

 Europeana Newspapers Project:

• Europeana Newspapers Project  – U.Kölsch & H.J. Lieder (Project Coordinator – BerlinState Library)
• Why refinement of digitised historical newspaper pages? –  Susan Reilly  (LIBER)
• Refinement – Clemens Neudecker (National Library of The Netherlands)
• Metadata – Günter Mühlberger (University of Innsbruck Library)

Digitisation & OCR panel:

Moderator: Prof. Dr. Nazan Özenç Uçak- (Hacettepe Üniversitesi)

• Prof. Dr. Bülent Yilmaz (Hacettepe Üniversitesi)
• Prof. Dr. Yaşar Tonta (Hacettepe Üniversitesi)
• Özhan Yilmaz – Uzman (Kalkınma Bakanlığı)
• Hakan Koray Özlük (Kütüphaneler ve Yayınlar Genel Müdürlüğü)
• Hasan Bahadır Aydinonat (Kütüphaneler ve Yayınlar Genel Müdürlüğü)

Afterwards the participants are offered a tour through the National Library of Turkey.

Agenda: ENP infoday NLT May 2013