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Newspaper Digitisation Program: enhancing access to Australia’s newspaper

Drouin NewsagencyJim Fitzpatrick (1916– )
Drouin Newsagency, Victoria c.1944
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Australia’s newspapers are a major record of the social, political, economic and cultural issues of their day. To improve access to this invaluable research resource the National Library of Australia is building a new text-searchable database covering the period 1803–1954, using one major newspaper from each state and territory. In building this database the Library is receiving strong support from the state and territory libraries.

From 2008, the Library expects to offer a new online service to enable full-text searching and viewing of content free of charge. The Library will initially populate the service with the 19th century portions of the representative newspapers: the Sydney Gazette, The Argus, The Courier Mail, and other newspapers from Hobart, Adelaide, Perth and Darwin. The Library will then digitise portions of these and other newspapers from the first half of the 20th century.

The Library recently announced that it has entered into a contract with Apex Publishing to provide services to convert digital page images produced from microfilm into text-searchable files through the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and other processes including the ‘zoning’ of the newspaper articles. Apex Publishing is a division of Apex CoVantage, a US provider of global Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).

As the Library’s Director-General, Jan Fullerton, commented on this exciting development: ‘The National Library sees this relationship with Apex Publishing as a major advance in our ability to digitise Australian text-based collections, and to make them more visible and accessible. This relationship will allow the Library to move into the area of “industrial scale” digitisation.’

Maxine Davis
Newspaper Digitisation Program
National Library of Australia