The workshop will take place on September 29-30th at The British Library.

What’s on the program?  The workshop aims to discuss the value of newspapers and the barriers to improving access to them. We have asked international librarians, researchers, policy makers, newspaper publishers and copyright experts to speak from their perspective. This will be the basis for further discussions during this workshop.

In this workshop The Europeana Newspapers Browser will be presented and participants will get the chance to test it.  Channa Veldhuijsen from the KB will talk about usability testing and will open the discussion on designing an interface for historic newspapers that responds to users’ expectations. The discussion will be based on the Europeana Newspapers browser, one’s own experiences and four case studies from partner libraries:

• The British Library
• Berlin State Library
• National and University Library of Slovenia
• National and University library of Iceland
• National Library of Luxembourg
• National Library of Czech Republic

This workshop is particularly aimed at:

• Cultural heritage professionals (e.g. from libraries, archives, museums, universities)
• Newspaper publishers
• Usability experts

How to register for the Europeana Newspapers workshop:

Step 1: Register here for the conference: http://www.eventbrite.nl/org/3891830439?s=14727265

Step 2: Confirm your conference registration with “ENP workshop” in the subject line to: radha.jainandunsing@kb.nl

Want to know more about what to expect?

Have a look at the  Amsterdam Workshop agenda

Five partners from the Europeana Newspapers Project travelled to Munich on June 26^th for a workshop at the LIBER 2013 conference – a major gathering for library professionals from around the world. The workshop was attended by 30 people. Through a series of presentations, the participants were introduced to the work of Europeana Newspapers and learned about best-practice techniques related to the refinement and enrichment of digital newspapers.

The workshop was based around three types of activities:

1. Presentations of the project’s activities, aimed at sharing best-practice techniques.
2. Buzz Groups, where participants could discuss the presentations and write down questions for the panel discussion.
3. A panel discussion, where participants had a chance to pose questions to the project’s partners.

Presentations
Marieke Willems from LIBER opened the workshop with an introduction to Europeana Newspapers and the structure of the workshop.

The survey is now being re-conducted, to allow more libraries to share their experience with newspaper digitisation. Add your voice.

The final workshop speaker was Günter Mühlberger from the University of Innsbruck.

He spoke about the ENMAP metadata profile being used by the project. A public version of this profile will be available in October. Mühlberger said that ENMAP provided a practical solution for coping with different data formats, and that this was important for a project aiming to create and make vast amounts of digital data accessible. He finished his presentation with food for thought on structural metadata: what is a headline, an advertisement, supplement or an opinion section?

Panel Discussion

The second part of the workshop was moderated by Alastair Dunning. On the panel were two of the speakers – Clemens Neudecker and Stefan Pletschacher – along with Birgit Seiderer (Bavarian State Library) and Tomas Foltyn (National Library of the Czech Republic).

The discussion started with the question: “Do you give the institutions a copy of the re-processed data?”. Neudecker confirmed that this was the case, and added that the workflow of the project also allowed libraries to evaluate old and new results after processing.

Other topics raised during the discussion included:

• Named Entity Recognition (NER) – Challenges were discussed, including historical spelling variations and the occurrence of different spellings between various source materials. The Europeana Newspapers Project is developing NER software (the training data in 4 languages will follow in the second half of 2013) that is freely available here: https://github.com/KBNLresearch/europeananp-ner.  The software was build upon the open source technology from Stanford University http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml and inspired on the work carried out by INL in Leiden during IMPACT, on which you can find more information here: http://www.digitisation.eu/tools/browse/toolbox-for-lexicon-building/named-entities-recognition-tool-nert/.  All panellists stated that the extending of NER for other languages would be interesting.
• Crowd Sourcing – Several questions came up concerning crowd sourcing that includes user features. Pletschacher said one study had shown that user-feature systems are often not appealing or user-friendly. Dunning disagreed and mentioned two examples from Australia http://trove.nla.gov.au/general/participating-in-digitised-newspapers-faq/and the UK http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/ that worked very well. Foltyn spoke about his idea to establish a step-by-step method of correcting errors in digitised content by way of crowd sourcing. The discussion ended with Dunning’s observation that niche sourcing (a more targeted type of crowd sourcing) was also a possibility.
• Metadata and Zoning – Different approaches of defining structural metadata. In the case of newspapers, it was felt that the structure and layout characteristics affected the meaning and perception of the text. These issues were still being discussed and defined.
• User Behaviour – A delegate from Latvia stated that some users were reluctant to consult the digital version of a newspaper. Seiderer said that some researchers needed to consult physical newspapers because they were looking for personal notes, or examining the type of ink and paper used. In other words, they were looking for more than the historical content in the newspaper.

The final question concerned the difficult field of copyright and personal rights for 20^th century  newspapers. It was noted that the issue of rights is handled very differently across Europe, and that examples from Norway and Switzerland show that newspaper publishers are ready to cooperate with libraries to make more recent content available.

Further Workshops
The Europeana Newspapers Project will hold two more workshops, where you can learn more about the work we are doing with digital newspapers.

1.  “Aggregation and Presentation” at the joint The European Library conference “Improving innovation in Europe” on September 16^th in Amsterdam. http://www.eventbrite.nl/org/3891830439?s=14727265
2. “European Newspapers and the Digital Agenda for Europe”, on September 29-30^th at the British Library in London.

This workshop is aimed at:

• Cultural heritage professionals (e.g. from libraries, archives, museums, universities)
• Newspaper publishers
• Usability experts

Enjoy a preview of what we’ll be addressing in September:

The interface for the Europeana Newspapers content browser: We aim to have a first iteration ready by the end of August, which will provide basic search facilities over the content from four libraries (national libraries of Austria, Finland, France and Friedrich Tessman library in Italy). Users will be able to search through metadata and full text of this content and then see images, or snippets of images, of the newspapers themselves. The interface will be embedded in the The European Library general interface, with a newspapers tab along from the current ‘full-text’ and ‘external search’ tabs. More content and functionality will be added during the rest of the project lifetime until we have all the project content ingested (or accessible externally) by the end of 2014. We also hope to organise some usability testing in 2014. Have a look at the ingestion and indexing plan.

Metadata alignment: Newspapers are quite complex objects normally structured in a hierarchical way, the metadata usually contains very rich information which is not necessarily about the newspaper itself, as an object, but also relates to specific events, places, agents in relation to the intellectual content of the newspaper. The aligning to Europeana Data Model (EDM) needs to comply with these requirements in order to reveal the richness of newspaper content. The report on EDM for newspapers describes the different solutions that EDM provides to meet the listed requirements.

Interested? 

We’ll be sharing this and much more at the Europeana Newspapers Aggregation and Presentation Workshop that will be part of The European Library’s conference: Promoting innovation in Europe, 16-17 September, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

How to register for the Europeana Newspapers workshop:

Step 1: Register here for the conference: http://www.eventbrite.nl/org/3891830439?s=14727265

Step 2: Confirm your conference registration with “ENP workshop” in the subject line to: radha.jainandunsing@kb.nl

We are looking forward to seeing you in Amsterdam!

How will The European Library aggregate the millions of digitised and refined historical newspaper pages being collected by Europeana Newspapers? What will the newspaper content browser look like?  At September’s Aggregation and Presentation Workshop we will answer these questions.

The workshop will be part of The European Library’s conference: Promoting innovation in Europe.

Where? Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Who? Organised by The European Library, this event will also feature projects that The European Library is involved with such as Europeana Newspapers, CENDARI, Europeana Cloud and Europeana Collections 1914-1918.

What? Keynote talks, discussion of Horizon 2020 & funding opportunities for libraries, and hands-on workshops.

When? 16-17^th of September

How? Register here

Want to know more? Read more about the event here.