National Library of Australia

Frequently Asked Questions

Which newspaper titles are included?

A selection of Australian newspapers published between 1803 and the copyright cut-off date of 1954 will be available. See Selected Newspapers for more information.

Can newspapers digitised by other libraries and organisations be included?

The National Library of Australia is interested in finding out what other Australian newspapers are being digitised. We are developing a model for national collaboration and intend to include regional newspapers in this Program. See Get Involved! to find out more.

What is OCR?

OCR is short for 'Optical Character Recognition'. It is a method of converting text contained in images, which cannot normally be searched, into text that is fully searchable. This is completed through the use of OCR software.

What does 3 million pages consist of?

This is about 375,000 individual newspaper issues, which will consist of about 30 million news stories.

How much storage is needed?

We have allocated 63 Terabytes of storage for 3 million pages. This is 63 trillion bytes. Files are measured in kilobytes (KB), then megabytes (MB), then gigabytes (GB), then terabytes (TB) then Petabytes (PB). A single high quality newspaper page as a greyscale tiff file is about 40MB, which is a very large file. This is the master file that all the other derivative files are generated from.

Last updated Tuesday 29-Jul-2008