To: Jack Kessler <kessler(a)well.com>
FYI France : Europeana digital library Newspapers Project
Worth-a-visit -- for any fans or foes of Google Digital Libraries, or
GoogleBooks, GoogleScholar, Google Books Library Project, or Amazon's
Kindle, or Apple's iBook Author or iTunes Producer, or Barnes &
Noble's Nook, or the BnF's Gallica, or Project Gutenberg's Project
Gutenberg, or Artelittera Téléchargement, or ebooks or Epub, etc. --
or the many online digital Theories Of Everything surrounding all &
each -- it's Europeana's recent announcement --
"Press Release, The Hague, 26th of June 2012 :
Launch of the Europeana Newspapers Project"
"A group of 17 European partner institutions have
joined forces in the Europeana Newspapers project to, over the next 3 years, provide more
than 18 million newspaper pages to the online service Europeana
<http://www.europeana.eu/> ."
For any of us who have fought the various battles involved with
newsprint -- from acid paper to indexing or more often the inadequacy
or complete lack thereof, from storage questions to microfilm's
manifold issues and complex secondary and tertiary intellectual
property agendas, and above all the thorny lineages of news outfits,
which change their names and swallow one another or get swallowed as
often as the rest of us change our socks -- the sheer courage of such
an announcement is impressive...
"Europeana is a single access point to millions
of digitised books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records sourced from
throughout Europe. The Europeana Newspapers project is funded under the Competitiveness
and Innovation Framework Program 2007-2013 of the European Commission with the aim of
aggregation and refinement of newspaper content through The European Library.
"Each library participating in the project will
distribute digitised newspapers and full-text via Europeana. The project aims to make the
newspaper content directly accessible for users through a special interface within the
content browser. This will be integrated into the Europeana portal and will allow queries
of phrases or single words within the newspapers' texts. This goes far beyond the
standard libraries catalogue search functions which usually allow the searching by date or
title only."
As to that last, well... Indexation of newspapers anywhere in the past
has ranged from none-at-all to erroneous -- even fine attempts have
run afoul often of the "editions game", their own indexing failing to
account accurately for differences, in an article's update version or
even publication at all, in any given outfit's West Coast or Weekend
or Local or National or European or Far East etc. edition.
Researchers, and research librarians, tear their hair...
"The project addresses challenges linked with
digitised newspapers such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Optical Layout
Recognition (OLR), article segmentation and page class recognition, and named entity
recognition (NER). OCR is the electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten,
typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. OLR is concerned with the detection
and separation of articles on a scanned page with more than one article. NER seeks to
locate entities in the full text and to classify them according to standardised names for
persons, locations, and organisations."
It will be fascinating to see what new tricks -- techniques &
approaches & degrees of understanding -- the Europeans will bring to
bear on these old problems, some of which are very old indeed.
Language policy and publication have struggled with weird character
sets and layout and naming conventions for millennia, in Europe:
through several Ages of Incunabula and various publication formats --
manuscript, print, radio & movies & tv, and now digital -- the
problems always have been not just technical, also legal & political &
social, cultural. What improvements will the latest digital
innovations bring -- what new wrinkles in new solutions to the very
old problems?
"The project will also evaluate the quality of
the refinement technologies and transform the local metadata into the Europeana Data Model
standard in close collaboration with stakeholders from the public and private
sector."
As I just mentioned, "The problems always have been not just
technical, also legal & political & social, cultural..."
"The Europeana Newspapers project is co-ordinated
by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Follow the advancements of
the Europeana Newspapers project at
www.europeana-newspapers.eu. For any further
information please contact Hans-Jörg Lieder or Thorsten Siegmann at Staatsbibliothek zu
Berlin via info(a)europeana-newspapers.eu <mailto:info@europeana-newspapers.eu> .
Project Partners:
BerlinState Library
National Library of the Netherlands
National Library of Estonia
Austrian National Library
University of Helsinki
National Library of Finland
Hamburg State and University Library
National Library of France
National Library of Poland
CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH
LIBER Foundation
National Library of Latvia
National Library of Turkey
Universityof Beograd
University of Innsbruck
Dr. Friedrich Tessmann Library
The British Library
University of Salford
The European Library
"Europeana is a multi-lingual online collection
of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual
collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 23 million books, films,
paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 2,200 content providers from
across Europe.
W3: (
http://www.europeana.eu <http://www.europeana.eu/> )
Twitter (
http://twitter.com/#!/eurnews <http://twitter.com/#!/eurnews> )
Facebook (
https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanaNewspapers
<https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanaNewspapers> )
LinkedIn (
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4425919
<http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4425919> )
--oOo--
A Note:
Kudos to these librarians, and others, anywhere and everywhere, who
undertake newspapers recon projects such as this one. As any exhausted
& double-visioned microfilm or microfiche user will attest, newspaper
research is a difficult task -- yet any historical researcher also
knows its inestimable value, in research there is little hard evidence
comparable to the immediacy of news reports and current events
analysis.
Well-considered weighty tomes written many years later may get the
history right. But history is not what people experience, they
experience the news, the current events, with its uncertainties,
rumors, unverified reports, unlikely sets of always-complicated
circumstances: without some knowledge of these, and an appreciation of
their significance in people's real lives, we cannot appreciate the
significance of events in our own -- their importance, also very often
their lack of importance -- preserving "the news", then, helps us
greatly, we can better see events of history through the eyes of those
who were there, and that helps us better understand our own.
Any set of decision-maker "memoires" can be used to support this --
all of them accounts from "the fog of war", valuable as much for their
reminder that wartime gets foggy and decision-making takes place in
times of uncertainty, as that certainty and conclusions taken at the
time very often look very odd later on -- from Julius Caesar's
analysis of his invasions of Gaul, to Condoleeza Rice's reasons
offered, in her lucid recent memoires, for the US invasion of Iraq --
yet the memoires make great reading, the weighty tomes more often not
so -- as a famous anecdote explains,
Professional historians do not esteem William Shirer. His historical
books are simplistic in interpretation, unbalanced in coverage,
superficially researched and full of wrongheaded theories. Worst of
all, they sell like crazy.
-- William Sheridan Allen, historian
So let's save the newspapers! We'll want to know what they said: what
they told us, what we told others in them, how we all felt about it at
the time -- all before we'd had a chance to think too much but
nevertheless were forced to act.
--
June Samaras
KALAMOS BOOKS
(For Books about Greece)
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : kalamosbooks(a)gmail.com
www.kalamosbooks.com
http://kalamosb.alibrisstore.com/
http://www.antiqbook.com/books/bookseller.phtml/kal