1. Europeana Newspapers Project
Turkish Information day
National Library of Turkey
Ankara, May 3rd
2013
Hans-Jörg Lieder/ Ulrike Kölsch
Project Coordinator
State Library of Berlin, Germany
EVENT/DATE/LOCATION

2. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 2
Content
Project Profile
• Aims and Objectives
• Consortium & Stakeholders
• Areas of activity

3. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 3
Europeana Newspapers Project
The Europeana Newspapers Project is a network of 18
partners who are working together until 2015 to make
more than 18 million digitised newspaper pages
(including 10 million pages of full-text content)
available via the Europeana ecosystem of online
services, with aggregation carried out by The
European Library.

4. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 4
Europeana Newspapers: Aims and Objectives
• Refinement methods for OCR, OLR (article segmentation),
Named Entity Recognition (NER) and class recognition
 Aggregation of 18 million pages of digitised newspapers to Europeana and to
The European Library
 8 million pages “as is” (content providers)
 10 million refined pages: OCR (UIBK, Austria)
 2 million refined pages: OCR/OLR (article segmentation) (CCS, Germany)
• Quality evaluation and prediction tools
• Aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and
Europeana
• Metadata: best practice recommendation for
 Creation of OCR-ready images
 Full-texts
 NER
• Dissemination: Further libraries will be encouraged to contribute newspapers to
Europeana by the project

5. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 5
Before we start…
Why newspapers?
"Die Zeitungen sind die Sekundenzeiger der Geschichte.“
(Newspapers are the sweep hands of history)
Arthur Schopenhauer
 Relevant to all citizens
 Highly relevant to European policies incl. Europeana Newspapers in libraries – between
Heaven = solid and complete originals, excellent microfilm copies and
Hell = frail and crumbly originals, missing editions, incomplete supplements, poor
microfilm copies, legal uncertainties with contemporary material

6. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 6
Consortium & Stakeholders
• 18 partners from 12 countries within the consortium
 National and University libraries
 Universities
 SME
• External partners and stakeholders:
 Involvement of libraries outside the project consortium
• Framework:
 Funded as a Best Practice Network in the ICTPSP program of the
European Commission
 Project Duration: February 2012 – January 2015

7. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp
Consortium Partners
10. CCS Content Conversion
Specialists GmbH
11. Stichting LIBER, Netherlands
12. National Library of Latvia
13. National Library of Turkey
14. University Library of Belgrade
15. University of Innsbruck
16. State Library Dr. Friedrich
Tessmann, Italy
17. The British Library, UK
18. Europeana Foundation,
Netherlands
01. State Library Berlin, Germany
02. National Library of the
Netherlands
03. National Library of Estonia
04. National Library of Austria
05. National Library of Finland
06. State and University Library
Hamburg, Germany
07. National Library of France
08. National Library of Poland
09. University of Salford

8. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 8
Special Focus on the Turkish Partner
• Turkish National Library provides more than 418,000 pages of Turkish
newspapers and yearbooks (1831-1922)
• The automatic character recognition of the Ottoman is
a special challenge; in the absence of commercial
software various prototype solutions
were tested (and rejected) in the
project
• Instead: take Latin script,
tackle Ottoman later
Ground Truth
OCR

9. This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp 9
Networking and Dissemination
German - Turkish Library Partnership launched in November 2011 in
Ankara
Three - year partnership is to promote professional exchange and
mutual consultation in current issues of library and information science
and push forward the development of library and information
institutions in both countries
Turkey was “guest country” at the 5th Library and Information Congress,
March 2013 in Leipzig, Germany
Poster presentation of the project

10. Thank you for your attention!
Contact:
hans-joerg.lieder@sbb.spk-berlin.de
ulrike.koelsch@europeana-newspapers.eu
For more information, please see www.europeana-newspapers.eu
or follow our project news via Twitter (@eurnews) and
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanaNewspapers)