Dutch embark on massive newspaper digitisation project
Dutch embark on massive newspaper digitisation project
February 24, 2009: The Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, the National Library of the Netherlands, has decided to digitise 8 million pages of historical newspapers, giving library users digital access to 400 years of history.
A contract to this end has been signed with German company CCS Content Conversion Specialists, makers of the docWORKS document digitiser - technology that is currently in use on a large scale digitisation project at the British Library.
The Dutch project began production in December 2008 andover 200,000 pages are digitised every month. The aim is to make the first results available to users online in the autumn of 2009.
For CCS, the technical challenge of the project is the very fact that Dutch newspapers spanning the past 400 years are being digitised – from the first ever newspaper of 1618, published in Amsterdam, right up to newspapers from the 20th century. It goes without saying that paper, size, layout, font and even language have all changed considerably during this period. But all of them need to be converted into digital items of matching high quality.
Merging the numerous supplements with the daily newspapers to produce one digital original which can be read as one piece is an additional challenge.
CCS, acting as general contractor, is collaborating with the Dutch company M&R in Kampen, who are handling the manual scanning with Zeutschel DIN A0 and DIN A1 overhead scanners. Quality Assurance, technological know-how and project coordination are provided by CCS, CCS’s subsidiary in Romania as well as their partners Planman in India, and Digital Divide Data in Cambodia.
Every week, a lorry takes carefully packed special cases containing magazines and microfilms from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague to M&R in Kampen and back again. Only about 10 percent of the newspapers allocated to the project have previously been captured on microfilm.
Over the past four centuries, the Netherlands have seen the publication of over 7,000 national, regional and local newspapers; a fact that has promoted heavy interest in preserving the invaluable socio-historical, political, economic, cultural and scientific information contained therein. The Dutch value their newspapers as an indispensable source of information for research in many areas, ranging from history and technological development to linguistics.
Daily papers, due to their transient nature, are printed on thin paper of poor quality, and are thus specially prone to decay. Given these facts, the Netherlands decided to start digitising newspapers on a large scale – the stocks that CCS will be digitising are not just inventories from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, but also material from other libraries such as those in Groningen, Maastricht and Nijmegen. Bit by bit, this procedure will lead to an online database of Dutch newspapers in The Hague, quite in suiting with the function of a national library.
CCS’s managing director Richard Helle said, “In 2005, the Library of Congress invited us to participate in a research project developing scientific standards for the digitisation of historical newspapers. In 2006, we converted the complete back issues of the British “Daily Mirror” into an online library over a short period of just a few weeks. 1.25 million pages in different formats. Ever since, digitising newspapers has been second nature to us, and we have a lot of valuable experience to offer.”
As the digitisation of 20th century papers is subject to copyright limitations, serious discussions focussed on resolving these issues are currently taking place between the various associations and organisations.