Program Schedule
Over the first four years of the Program, we intend to provide full-text searchable access to approximately three million digital Australian newspaper pages covering a span of over 150 years from 1803 to the mid 1950s.
In addition a further million pages from the Sydney Morning Herald 1831-1954 will also be digitised.
Key Milestones - Achieved (2007-2008)
- March 2007 – Contract with Apex CoVantage for OCR and content analysis services commences
- April 2007 – Newspaper Digitisation Program Manager commences at National Library of Australia (NLA)
- May 2007 – NLA complete development of Content Management System to manage the digitisation process, workflows and quality assurance of scanned images
- June 2007 – NLA complete scanning, quality assurance and metadata entry on 50,000 newspaper pages for the Pilot Phase
- July 2007 – NLA upgrade infrastructure to meet storage needs of Newspaper Digitisation Program (62 Terabites required for 2007-2008)
- August 2007 – Apex CoVantage (OCR Contractor) complete development of production software to NLA specification for processing and quality assurance of newspaper digital images, and begin to process 50,000 page pilot
- October 2007 – 50,000 page image pilot completed and evaluated, then Phase 1 (OCR on 500,000 images commences). [Commenced June 2008]
- December 2007 – Search and delivery system prototype released for testing to State and Territory Libraries with 50,000 pilot data in the system
- April 2008 - 1 million images scanned from microfilm
- July 2008 - Beta service publicly released with 50,000 processed pilot pages.
- November 2008 - 310,000 pages added to Beta service
Key Milestones - In progress (2009 -2010)
- 2009 - Official Public Launch of service.
- 2009 - 1.5 million pages available in the service
- 2010 - 4 million pages available in the service
Last updated Monday 08-Dec-2008