This document discusses the Europeana Newspapers project and how it can be used to learn about Nikola Tesla from digitized historical newspapers. The project aims to aggregate and refine over 18 million digitized newspaper pages from European libraries to make them searchable through Europeana. It will use techniques like optical character recognition, article segmentation, and named entity recognition during the refinement process. The document provides an example of finding information on Nikola Tesla, including a 1926 quote from him on wireless technology and mentions that his museum in Belgrade and open access American newspapers contain searchable articles about him.

1. Europeana newspapers project contribution to
the freedom of information: finding out about
Nikola Tesla from historical newspapers
Dr Stela Filipi Matutinovic
Jelena Andonovski
University of Belgrade, University Library “Svetozar Markovic”
INFORUM, Prague, 2013

2. Europeana Newspapers: Aims and Objectives
• Aggregation and refinement of newspapers for portal
Europeana.
• Will use refinement methods for OCR, OLR (article
segmentation), and named entity (NER)
• The libraries participating in the project will provide
around 18 million digitised newspaper pages to
Europeana
• European libraries will be encouraged to contribute
newspapers to Europeana, 11 already invited
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3. EUROPEANA NEWSPAPERS CONSORTIUM
SBB ONB
NLP
BnF
SUB HH
USAL
NLL
KB
LIBER
CCS
NLT
UB
UBIK
LFT
BL

4. Who was Nikola Tesla?
“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be
converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being
particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to
communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of
distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we
shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were
face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles;
and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his
will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone.
A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
Nikola Tesla, 1926
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5. Contemporary newspaper`s articles on Tesla
Press clippings in Nikola Tesla
Museum in Belgrade
Searchable full text articles in
open access from American
newspapers

6. Searchable articles on Tesla in Europe
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7. Thank you for your attention!
Stela Filipi Matutinovic
stela@unilib.bg.ac.rs