Digitisation of Newspapers at the British Library

King, Edmund

doi:10.1300/j123v49n01_07

Cited by 15 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…54 This part of the story is admirably documented by project managers and department heads at the British Library, including Jane Shaw and Ed King, who continually shared process lessons about large-scale newspaper digitization with the library community in the 2000s. 55 Their published conference papers include an assessment of the image quality and material durability of microfilm slated to become digital facsimiles. Decades of microfilm had been developed on acetate rolls, subject to acidic decay, before microfilm preservation standards changed to more stable polyester substrates.…”

Section: From Scanning To Global Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For all the British Library's admirable transparency, its relations to third-party vendors can be vague: "The allocation of work between inhouse operations and third parties is based on where value can best be achieved, balancing the cost effectiveness of competitive tender with the optimum deployment of experience and expertise from the library." 65 The corporate language exemplifies the abstract characterizations of labor and costs which render invisible and palatable the conditions of outsourced work, especially in global contexts. Having taken the "view that the use of human intelligence combined with software applications would give the best quality result," the British Library chose a company called Apex CoVantage, which the metadata in the XML files for JISC I (Gale Part I) still names in its <conversionCredit> element.…”

Section: From Scanning To Global Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers

Fyfe¹

2016

Victorian Periodicals Review

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As Robert Darnton sees it, we are living amidst the most recent of "four fundamental changes in information technology" that have patterned human history. 1 Coming just before our age of digital transition, he claims, was the Victorian epoch, which was transformed by a dramatic expansion of texts and readers. Darnton's sketch is at once debatable and elegant, offering an attractive homology to nineteenth-century scholars who would connect these moments of change, past and present. 2 In the forms of digitized historical resources and computational research methods, the connections between media shifts then and now can not only be theorized but also operationalized, with the nineteenth century's prolific sources serving as the materials for twenty-first century digital humanities research. This essay results from just such an initiative-a content-mining project focused on the digital collection British Nineteenth-Century Newspapers from the commercial publisher Gale Cengage. Yet my goal is not to explain the contemporary challenges of computational approaches, the scale of digital materials, or a culture of proliferating information that connects us to the Victorians. Instead, this essay calls attention to the gaps in that story: the largely hidden history of how Victorian data gets to now. It argues that our justifiable enthusiasm for linking past and present has effectively erased the interval between-the twentieth-century transmission histories that established the parameters for scholarly resources in digital forms. New media is always in the process of constituting itself as new, erasing the legacies of its entanglements and the continuous work of its propagation. 3 This essay follows the lead of several scholars in media studies and critical bibliography to outline-and then pursue-a method for investigating these material histories, an "archaeology" of data, to better grasp the historiography of our research objects, which are expressed, for the moment, in digital form. Such an approach enables us not only to understand the mediated

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Section: From Scanning To Global Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Scanning To Global Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers

Fyfe¹

2016

Victorian Periodicals Review

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“…Several researchers and practitioners point out that newspaper digitization projects are especially challenging because of large format, complex page layout, and poor quality of print (Gilboe, 2005;King, 2005;Klijn, 2008), requiring many libraries to outsource the scanning process. Because of the historical nature of the collection and the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library, outsourcing was not an option and the image capture process had to be performed in-house.…”

Section: Digitization Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digitizing the historical periodical collection at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in East Jerusalem

Matusiak¹,

Harb²

2011

Newspapers

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“…Technological developments have moved forward rapidly in the last few years, and the BL has taken initiatives to create wider access to its newspapers published before 1900 (for a review of these early developments in the digitisation of newspapers at the library, see King (2005)). With funding available from the UK JISC [9], and in particular from its Digitisation Programme[10] the BL embarked upon the British Newspapers 1800-1900 project in April 2004[11] and together with a panel of experts, selected 48 newspapers for digitisation.…”

Section: Digitisation Of Historic Newspapersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The British Library newspaper collections and future strategy

Fleming

King²

2009

Interlending &Amp; Document Supply

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PurposeThis paper aims to describe the history and current plans for the newspaper collections of the British Library.Design/methodology/approachThe Library will create more access to its older collections, via mass digitisation of texts. The Library is seeking to work with UK newspaper publishers to secure the ingest of “born digital” newspapers, to present issues of recent newspapers to users in library reading rooms. Digitised newspapers will be taken into the Library's digital library storage system being developed for all types of digital materials that the Library is acquiring in growing quantities. There are plans to move the existing collections from Colindale to a new storage facility at its Boston Spa site, to ensure controlled environmental conditions for the original printed newspapers.FindingsIt was found that the British Library is investing in the future in order to improve access to a vital part of its collections.Originality/valueThis is one of the few published articles on how a national library deals with the massive task of providing access to newspapers.

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Digitisation of Newspapers at the British Library

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers

An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers

Digitizing the historical periodical collection at the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in East Jerusalem

The British Library newspaper collections and future strategy

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