Dear All,
In the United Kingdom there is a large, and well funded,
project to take historical newspapers and process images to
microfilm - the Newsplan project. I have a feeling that
microfilm is rather old technology but many would strongly
disagree. I'd rather see tif colour scans of the pages. Newsplan
is now looking at creating an index to the newspapers so it is
possible to actually locate material. Beyond this, of course, it
makes sense to use optical character recognition technology to
convert the text into a machine readable form. The Centre for
Data Digitisation and Analysis currently has a bid in to the New
Opportunities Fund - Digitisation to fund the OCR'ing of
materials - including newspapers - relating to the Act of Union
in 1801 between Britain and Ireland. Should this project be
funded our experience of computerising historical newsprint may
be of value.
Best wishes,
Paul
Listowner
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Dr Paul S. Ell
Director
The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis
School of Sociology and Social Policy
The Queen's University of Belfast
Belfast
BT7 1NN
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
WWW: www.qub.ac.uk/cdda/
Discussion list: www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/history-digitisation
Phone: +44 (0)28 90273408
FAX: +44 (0)28 90320668
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