Today, the National Library of the Faroe Islands publicly opened the digital archive containing nearly all the faroese newspapers and selected periodica as open access. www.tidarrit.fo

The archive contains 38 titles and roughly 500.000 pages going from 1852 until 1999.

The project has been realized as a part of the digital strategy of the Faroese National Library to digitize and give access to the rich faroese cultural heritage.

Text and images kindly provided by Erling Kjærbo, National Library of the Faroese Islands

Die Sam-Cohen-Bibliothek ist eine Präsenzbibliothek mit etwa 10.000 Büchern in Swakopmund, Namibia. Träger der Bibliothek sowie des Swakopmund Museums und des Otavi-Bahnhofs ist die Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft Swakopmund, eine gemeinnützige private Vereinigung. Die Bibliothek beherbergt auch die bekannte Africana-Sammlung von Ferdinand Stich.

Im dazugehörenden Sam-Cohen-Archiv befindet sich eine Zeitungssammlung von 1898 bis heute, eine große Sammlung historischer Fotos, Landkarten und Schriftstücke verschiedener Wissensgebiete. Viele der Fotos sind heute digitalisiert und können eingesehen werden.

Auf dem Gelände der Bibliothek steht auch der denkmalgeschützte Otavi-Bahnhof. In dem nach historischer Vorlage restaurierten Gebäude befindet sich heute der Living-Desert-Schlangenpark und der Save the Rhino Trust. Der ehemalige Güterschuppen, das OMEG-Haus sowie ein kleiner Botanischer Garten mit Pflanzen aus der Namib können ebenfalls besichtigt werden.

Die einzigartige Zeitungssammlung umfasst 25 verschieden Titel. Die ersten von 1898, wie der “Windhoeker Anzeiger”, der dann in der “Deutsch-Suedwestafrikanischen Zeitung” aufging, die wiederum bis 1914 existierte. Andere wiederum wie die “Allgemeine Zeitung”, die 1919 gegründet wurde und die “Namib Times” von 1958  gibt es auch heute noch.

Die meisten Titel waren in deutscher Sprache gehalten um die deutsche Bevölkerung in Südwest-Afrika über Nachrichten aus Namibia und natürlich auch über Nachrichten aus Übersee und der eigenen Heimat zu informieren. Der Umfang der Zeitungen war über die Jahre unterschiedlich. Ausgaben mit vier
Seiten bis hin zu 20 Seiten waren durchaus üblich. Die “Allgemeine Zeitung” z.B. hat heute durchschnittlich 12 bis 16 Seiten.

Alles in allem kann man sagen, dass es in Namibia seit über hundert Jahren eine deutsche Zeitungskultur gibt, die sich bis heute, allerdings nur noch in einigen deutschen Beiträgen in englischen Ausgaben und in der rein deutschen “Allgemeinen Zeitung” ausdrückt.

Unser besonderer Dank gilt Francois Hartz und der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft Swakopmund die uns auf diese besonderen Zeitungen aufmerksam gemacht haben.

Bereitstellung der Zeitungsabbildungen:
Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft Swakopmund

The Sam-Cohen-Library is a reference library in Swakopmund, Namibia and situated next to the former Otavi Bahnhof, or railway station, which was the west coast terminal of the narrow gauge railway line to the copper mine at Tsumeb in the north. The building is being converted into a Transport Museum and an Arts and Craft Centre.

The library, which initially started with only 5 books, today comprises some 10.000 volumes, which include the famous 2000-title Africana Collection of the late Ferdinand Stich. The library is a treasure chest for scholars, students and scientists alike. The archives, which belong to the Scientific Society Swakopmund are also housed in the Sam-Cohen-Library. They grant visitors access to a unique collection of newspapers from 1898 to the present day. Also available is an extensive collection of historical photographs, maps and documents.

The unique newspaper collection comprises 25 different titles. The earliest ones date back to 1898, such as the „Windhoeker Anzeiger“, that later on became the “Deutsch-Suedwestafrikanische Zeitung”, which in turn existed until 1914. Other titles like the “Allgemeine Zeitung” that was founded in 1919 or the “Namib Times” from 1958 are still running today.

Most of the titles were in German, aiming to inform the German population in Southwestern Africa about the news from Namibia as well as from overseas and the home country. The newspapers typically consist of somewhere between four and twenty pages, with the “Allgemeine Zeitung” on average comprising 12-16 pages.

One can say that there is a German newspaper culture in Namibia that goes back more than 100 years, while nowadays it has been reduced mainly to the occasional German article in English papers and the fully German-language “Allgemeine Zeitung”.

Our warm regards go out to Francois Hartz and the Scientific Society Swakopmund for making us aware of these historical newspaper treasures.

Image credit for the newspapers: Scientific Society Swakopmund

The European Library is the project partner responsible for developing our historic newspapers browser. One of the biggest challenges they have faced while building this browser is the storage of extremely large files containing digitised newspaper images.

Why are the images so large? The process starts with the libraries undertaking the digitisation work. They create individual master files of each page and each of these files ranges between 10 and 50 MB.

These images are then made available to The European Library, which in turn shares them with researchers via its historic newspapers browser. To make the images useful to researchers, each image needs to be up to 2.5MB in size. Anything less won’t do since words, characters and images would be too blurry to examine properly.

If we assume an average image size of 1.5MB, making 10 million images available would demand a total server space of around 14 Terabytes. This is not sustainable in the long run.

Improved Image Retrieval Technique
The European Library technical team has come up with a new solution. Instead of centrally harvesting all the images and storing these on The European Library’s servers, numerous libraries have made it possible to directly access their image servers. This means that each library’s own hardware space, where suitably sized images are already stored, can be utilised. When a user searches on The European Library site and asks to see a particular image, a request is then sent to out to the original library to dynamically grab an image from the source library’s server and bring it into view.

Take this 1849 issue of the Viennese newspaper, Wiener Zeitung, for example. This digitised newspaper from the Austrian National Library allows the user to have full functionality over the image. One can zoom in and out and fully explore the image within The European Library interface even though the digital version remains housed on a server in Vienna.

This approach has another advantage in that it lets the curator of the original material maintain control over the digitised versions. Lack of control, as cited by many technical managers, is one of the main reasons as to why they are reluctant to share content with third party publishers.

Challenges of Image Retrieval
However, not all libraries partaking in the Europeana Newspapers project appreciate this approach. This is because a fair amount of effort is required to allow images to be technically retrieved in this manner.

For example, pages from the below 1914 issue of a Latvian newspaper entitled ‘Drywa’ (from the National Library of Latvia) are pre-harvested and stored on The European Library server itself.

Alastair Dunning, Programme Manager at The European Library is excited about the implementation of this image retrieval technique: “As knowledge of this technique increases, I imagine it will become more popular than pre-assembling a collection and having to go through the process of harvesting and then storing the collection, which is time-consuming and costly.”

“This solution implies that third party aggregators will be able to curate, showcase and publish specific collections drawn from a variety of sources. Content will no longer remain trapped in institutional silos and can instead be more easily seen and contextualised in a variety of different settings,” says Alastair.

Where Can I Find the Europeana Newspapers Tool?
The prototype of the Europeana Newspapers tool is now available on The European Library homepage. From there, the user can search for specific historic newspaper titles and browse by various critera such as issue date or country.

Please note that the tool will be user tested in April to assess functionality, report bugs and map the way forward in terms of the tool’s technical requirements. A beta version with improved functionality will be released later this year.

It has a great deal of experience in making digital newspapers available online. Already, thousands of its own digitised newspapers are available via its Historical Newspapers (Historische Kranten) portal.

Today, we’re taking a look at the content that will be contributed to the Europeana Newspapers Project by the National Library of the Netherlands. For a closer look at each paper, simply click on the image and a gallery will appear.

[ezcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end id=”” class=”multicolumn” style=””]This newspaper from 1896 reports on the first Olympic Games since the year 393. The article states that the organisers did not want it to be an old-fashioned event, so they added gymnastics, swimming, tennis, cricket, cycling, shooting and fencing to the program. There was no one competing on behalf of the Netherlands, but luckily this did not stop the publishers from writing a two page article on the Olympic Games.[/ezcol_1half_end]

[ezcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end id=”” class=”multicolumn” style=””]This article is from the oldest newspaper on the newspaper website of the KB. The original lies in the Royal Library of Sweden and they gave permission for the KB to digitise the newspapers for publication. The KB wanted to digitise the paper because it includes an article about one of the most important events in the (Dutch) Reformed Church, namely the Synod of Dordrecht. At this meeting, it was also decided to translate the bible into Dutch for the first time.[/ezcol_1half_end]

[ezcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end id=”” class=”multicolumn” style=””]This article reports the death of president Lincoln on April 14th, 1865. The newspaper was only published in the Netherlands some two weeks later, on April 30th, 1865. The article presents a number of telegrams about the event and the death of not only president Lincoln, but also that of Frederic Seward, the son of Secretary of State William Seward. He was attacked in his house at the same time as Lincoln, by Lewis Powell. However, it is nice to note that Frederic Seward survived and lived to be 84.[/ezcol_1half_end]

Every month we highlight one partner of the Europeana Newspapers Project. These articles will give you the ‘inside story’ about our partners, their specific role within the project and the various challenges that arise with the refinement and aggregation of historical newspapers. This month we feature the National Library of Latvia.

Founded in 1919, the National Library of Latvia (NLL) holds the largest collections of books, serials, maps, and sheet music in the country. It is both Latvia’s legal deposit library and a significant academic library. The NLL is also a competence centre for the library system and the driving force behind country’s major literacy and reading programmes for children and young adults.

In addition to these roles, the NLL is heavily involved in a range of challenges and events. In 2014, its collections and staff will relocate to a new library building, known as the Castle of Light.

This impressive structure, designed by renowned architect Gunnars Birkerts, is both technologically smart and architecturally impressive.

Next year, the library will also how major events being organised as part of Riga’s role as the European Capital of Culture 2014. In 2015, the NLL will be the office and meeting site for the Council of the European Union during Latvia’s presidency.

Digitisation is another major area of work for the NLL. It has been developing a National Digital Library for the past decade. The first digitisation project was launched in 1999, with about 2 million digitised pages of historical newspapers. Thanks to funding from the European Regional Development Fund, more than 700 titles of periodicals and 7000 books were also digitised. A new portal for digital collections and enhanced user interactivity was also made possible through this project.

Why newspapers?
Newspapers and magazines have always been an important source of data for historians – more so in Latvia where the process of reconstructing and rethinking the history after the World War II is still underway.

The history of Latvian periodicals mirrors the nation’s turbulent history, from the first national awakening in the 19th century until the regaining of freedom in 1990.

During the Soviet era (1945-1990) the operation of public media (along with all other kinds of publishing) was subjected to censorship. It was the press, however, that carried through the message of freedom at the end of the 1980s. Latvian newspapers vividly demonstrate that periodicals are not mere chroniclers of the passing scene. They can bring about or suppress the social and political change.

In the first years after regaining independence, retelling the political history of Latvia seemed the most urgent matter. Society and researchers alike rushed away from the Soviet lifestyle, culture, literature, art, fashion, and even cuisine as if they did not want to know about it ever again. Recently, however, researchers have once again begun to analyze the cultural heritage, literature, art, criticism, and everyday life of the Soviet era.

Moreover, since the early 1990s researchers in humanities were eager to adopt various theories and trends that, despite being widely-known and influential in Western world, were virtually unknown in the Soviet cultural setting. This includes a keen interest in history, from social and private history to contemporary folklore, the history and sociology of sexuality, gender studies, et cetera.

Interest in digitised periodicals is also on the rise, thanks to the rich, multilayered material periodicals can provide and the new browsing and searching possibilities of digitised materials. Recently a new, promising programme for history teachers was initiated, using the resources of the Latvian National Digital Library and Europeana to teach the history of Latvia and the world.

Impact Of The Europeana Newspapers Project
Europeana Newspapers will allow the NLL to process about 100 titles of periodicals, and to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to those titles. Most of these are from the early 20th century, which is also the time when the independent country of Latvia was born (Latvia became an independent country in 1918) and this in turn means that these periodicals will provide unique insight into the birth and development of modern-day Latvia.

The periodicals being contributed include both traditional, daily newspapers and official government-published collections of laws and orders. One of the most important newspapers provided is Jaunākās Ziņas (roughly translated as “The Most Recent News”). This was probably the most influential and widely read daily newspaper in 1930s Latvia.

Another important newspaper NLL will provide is Valdības Vēstnesis (translated as “The Government Herald”), which contains every law and order issued by Latvia’s government. Although only 3 years of this periodical will be processed (1918-1920), these are also the first 3 years of Latvia as an independent country.

Most of the newspapers provided by NLL will be in Latvian, but because of Latvia’s dynamic history at the beginning of 20th century, many newspapers will be in Russian and German as well.

These newspapers might be especially interesting to researchers of World War I and World War II as different ideological view-points on these topics will be represented.

One challenge of this digitisation work is the typeface. Many of the newspapers held by the NLL were published in Fraktur typeface, which has always been more challenging to process than Antiqua. However, the first samples of the NLL’s newspapers (processed at the University of Innsbruck) have resulted in a high-quality digital version (including OCR), even for the older texts.

You can see more images from the National Library of Latvia’s newspaper collection on the Europeana Newspapers Flickr stream.