1. What‘s up, Europeana Newspapers?
Clemens Neudecker (@cneudecker)
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin –
Preußischer Kulturbesitz

2. A little bit of history
2012 – 2015: Europeana Newspapers
ICT-PSP Project (2012-2015)
31 Dec 2016: The European Library (TEL) closed
2017: DSI-2/3: Migration;
Newspapers Collection Plan
July 2018: Planned Re-Launch of Europeana
Newspapers as thematic collection

3. Main outcomes
– TEL Historic Newspapers Portal:
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers
– Deliverables:
http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/
public-materials/deliverables/
– Tools:
http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/
public-materials/tools/
– Final Report:
http://europeananewspapers.github.io/

4. Data
• 1618 – 2016
• 12 countries
• 40 languages
• 120 TB
• Ca. 1,000 titles
• 3,3M issues

5. Data
• Metadata for more than >20 million pages
• 12 million pages processed with OCR
• 2 million pages processed with OLR
• Most content licensed as Public Domain
• All metadata licensed under CC0
• Copyright cut-off date
(„copyright cliff of death“)

6. Data
• JP2000 images for use with IIIPserver
• METS container with embedded MODS
for structural and bibliographic metadata
• ALTO for OCRed text
• EDM for Europeana
 Europeana Newspapers METS/ALTO Profile
(ENMAP)

7. OCR/OLR
• OCR: ABBYY FineReader Engine 11
– Gothic license per page (A4!)
– 4 servers with 8 cores = 32 processing cores
– Average processing time of 5s per newspaper page
• OLR: CCS docWorks
– Article separation & page classification
– Possibility for post-correction/validation of results

8. Evaluation
• Scenario-based performance evaluation of
OCR/OLR using PAGE ground truth
• Ground truth dataset:
http://primaresearch.org/datasets/ENP
• Performance Evaluation Report:
http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/D3.5_Performance_Ev
aluation_Report_1.0.pdf

9. Evaluation
82.4%
85.3%
80.9%
75.9%
67.5%
83.4% 84.1%
68.1%
93.1%
57.6%
87.0%
68.3%
76.1%
82.6%
54.1%
32.7%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
SuccessRate
Language Setting
Bag of Words OCR Evaluation
Per Language
67.3%
81.4%
64.0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Gothic Normal Mixed
SuccessRate
Font
Bag of Words OCR Evaluation
Per Font
79.1%
62.2%
55.9%
58.8%
94.7%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Keyword
search
Phrase search Access via
content
structure
Print/ebook
on demand
Content
based image
retrieval
SuccessRate(harmonic,areabased)
Evaluation Profile
Layout Analysis Performance
Per evaluationprofile
74.35%
75.31%
70%
71%
72%
73%
74%
75%
76%
77%
NCSR Binarisation Original Image
SuccessRate
Image Source
Bag of Words OCR Evaluation
Binarised image vs. original image
75.3%
53.78%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
SuccessRate(countbased)
OCR Engine
Bag of Words OCR Evaluation
FineReader vs. Tesseract
FineReader Tesseract

10. Use in Research

11. Use in Research
• Oceanic Exchanges (Digging Into Data, 2017-2019)
• impresso (Swiss National Fund, 2017 – 2020)
• NewsEye (EU H2020, 2018 – 2020)
• CLARIN (EU ERIC)
• Europeana Research, Interviews with Researchers
• At Scientific Conferences
– DAS, ICDAR: Europeana Newspapers Ground Truth
– LREC, ACL: Europeana Newspapers NER Corpora

12. Oceanic Exchanges
(Digging Into Data, 2017-2019)

13. impresso
(Swiss National Fund, 2017 – 2020)

14. Use in Research
• Digital Humanities
– DHd AG Newspapers initiated at DHd 2018
– #HacktheNews workshop at DHNord 2018
– Roundtable on newspapers at DHBenelux 2018
• At the Berlin State Library:
– University Regensburg
– Technical University Dortmund
– Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences

15. Other Activities
• Rise of Literacy Generic Services Projekt
• IIIF Newspaper Interest Group
– http://iiif.io/community/groups/newspapers/
– https://github.com/IIIF/awesome-iiif#newspapers
• TEI SIG Newspapers & Periodicals
– https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/
SIG:Newspapers%26Periodicals

16. Creative Reuse

17. Berliner Schlagzeilen
• Created as part of Coding da Vinci Berlin 2017
• Twitterbot that tweets out daily about the
news from 100 years ago
• Source code available:
https://github.com/shoutrlabs/
berliner-schlagzeilen

20. Altpapier App
• Created as part of Coding da Vinci Berlin 2017
• Android (and soon also iOS) app that shows the
user newspaper articles with the possibility to
correct errors
• Available as source code
https://github.com/mariabecker/OldNews
and on the Play Store
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ol
dnews.de.oldnews

22. Visualizing European Newspapers
• Visualization prototype with large touch
interface composed of multiple screens
made by Sven Charleer of KU Leuven

24. Future Plans

25. Europeana Newspapers
Thematic Collection

26. The Situation in Germany
2012 – 2015:DFG Pilot Project
„Digitisation of historical newspapers“
Master Plan, Guidelines, etc.
2017: Relaunch of ZDB union catalog of serials
http://zdb-katalog.de/
2017: DFG Proposal (SBB, DDB involved)
„A national portal for digitised historical
newspapers at the Germany Digital Library“
2018: DFG Call for proposals
„Digitisation of historical newspapers“