Talk at the Bibliotheca Baltica 2018 Conference, 4-5 October, Rostock, Germany

1. Extrablatt: The Latest News on
Newspaper Digitisation in Europe
Clemens Neudecker @cneudecker
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Bibliotheca Baltica | 4-5 October 2018

2. Contents
• Newspaper Digitisation in Germany
• Europeana Newspapers
• Digital Humanities Newspaper Research

3. • Newspaper Digitisation in Germany

4. Germany: Pilot Project & Masterplan
• DFG-funded Pilot Project (2013 – 2015)
investigating the feasibility of large-scale
digitisation of German historical newspapers
• Outcomes (unfortunately only in German):
– Master Plan & Online Guide
– Checklist in-house digitisation vs. Outsourcing
– Checklist digitisation from Microfilm vs. Original
– Guidelines for cataloguing in the ZDB

5. Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB)
• ZDB = database of serial publications
• New user interface with novel exploration
and visualization features

6. Germany: A National Newspaper
Portal
• Due to historical fragmentation (federalism),
already digitized newspapers in Germany are
spread across dozens of institutions, which is a
major burden for users
• Solution:
– Establish a single access point for digitized
newspapers from Germany
– Include this with the German Digital Library (DDB)
– Reuse results and findings of the pilot project,
Europeana Newspapers and others
– Starting November 1st 2018, initially for 2 years

7. Germany: DFG Call for Newspaper
Digitisation Projects
• DFG Call for Projects: Digitisation of historical
newspapers of the German-speaking area
– Goals:
• Significantly increase the availability of digitized German
newspapers - with a special focus on researchers needs
– Requirements:
• Proposals must be for a thematic cluster of titles
• Justification for digitisation has to be on a title level
• OCR is a must, a detailed OCR evaluation needs to be included
• Entries about planned digitisation in the ZDB catalogue
• Presentation must be compatible with DFG-Viewer

8. Elsewhere in Europe…
• UK: In the context of the British Library's Heritage
Made Digital programme, a major part involves
digitizing 19th century British newspapers and
publishing them open access [1]
• Sweden: All Swedish daily newspapers from 1734–
1906 will soon be available online, free for everyone
to read and download thanks to a donation from the
Arcadia research institution [2]
• Denmark: Digitization of 32m newspaper pages [3]
• Switzerland: Swiss National Library launches common
digital newspaper portal with correction facility [4]

9. • Europeana Newspapers

10. Europeana Newspapers
• Background:
– EU Project Europeana Newspapers (2012 – 2015)
– TEL Historic Newspaper Browser
– 2016: CENL decides to discontinue TEL 
– 2017: Finding a new home for 10 TB of newspaper
data…
• Europeana to the rescue!
• Problem: Europeana does not provide full-text search
• Problem: Europeana infrastructure, data model & API need
significant changes to support the newspapers
• Problem: Interdepencies with other content & services
 A lot of work!

16. • Digital Humanities Newspaper Research

17. Digital Humanities Newspaper
Research
• Strong (and growing) interest in digitized
historical newspapers from the research
community
• Diverse interests and research questions
from the humanities, social sciences,
linguistics, computer science
• Collaboration with CLARIN.EU and Europeana
Research to make newspaper data available
• Pilot project with EUDAT

22. Thank you for your attention!
Questions?
Clemens Neudecker @cneudecker
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Bibliotheca Baltica | 4-5 October 2018