Contributor/Presenter:
Hans-Jörg Lieder (Head of the Department of Bibliographic Services),
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library)
Title:
Making Historic Newspapers Available Online: Why, Where and How
Abstract:
So far the European portals (The European Library, Europeana) have mainly concerned themselves
with providing access to digital images and the corresponding metadata. The Europeana Newspapers
Project (ENP) is the first initiative to provide vast collections of texts to The European Library in
excess of 10 million historic newspaper pages. The presentation will detail the large-scale creation of
content and will also present the other areas of activity of the ENP: the formulation of metadata best
practice recommendations, the development of quality evaluation and quality prediction tools, markup features like Named Entity Recognition etc.
Newspaper contents clearly require a specific search&retrieval environment. TEL’s solution for this
will be shown, including the usual services for such content, like calendar navigation and text search.
It is evident that the actual value of the collections of texts will increase with the level of aggregation:
in many respects it is correct to say “the bigger, the better”.
What other services should libraries envisage when it comes to huge text collections and where
should these be realized? The presentation will argue the case for providing a sound layer of services
at the access point of maximal aggregation, i.e. TEL. Typically libraries are well advised to develop
services that go beyond a simple text search in direct cooperation with the targeted user groups to
assure that the services are actually wanted. However, what if, as is the case with historic
newspapers, user groups and, indeed, use cases, can no longer be clearly defined because the
objects themselves appear to be relevant to virtually everyone? How do libraries determine the layer
of services when users cannot be easily asked? The presentation will aim at giving some preliminary
answers to this dilemma.
Biography:
Hans-Jörg Lieder works with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany, and has a sound background as
a manuscript librarian, in which area he has worked for about 15 years, lastly as the head of the
German national union catalogue for modern manuscript materials, Kalliope. As the present head of
the German Zeitschriftendatenbank (German Union Catalogue of Serials) he has changed his focus of
attention to serial materials – mainly journals and newspapers – and is currently coordinating the EUfunded Europeana Newspapers Project, in which 18 European partners will provide more than 18
million newspaper pages to Europeana