Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

In the last few years, as digitization has gradually moved from an experimental and temporal activity towards one that is structural and continuous, mass digitization projects have been gaining ground.1 Almost simultaneously with the 'coming-of-age' of digitization, an increasing number of large-scale newspaper digitization projects (Austria, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Chili, Sweden, New Zealand, USA) have emerged.2 Because newspapers appeal to a large audience and in many cases remain inaccessible to a large degree, it is no surprise that many institutions decide to digitize their newspaper collections first. Digitization and web delivery makes these collections available to a worldwide audience. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology – in spite of its shortcomings – offers better search-and-retrieval functionality than has been possible before. The demand has grown for companies capable of providing digitization services for newspaper collections. A new market is evolving, with rapidly changing customer needs and company solutions.

From 2007 to 2011, within the framework of the project Databank of Digital Daily Newspapers (DDD), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, the National Library of the Netherlands) will digitize and put online 8 million pages from a selection of national, regional, local and colonial Dutch daily newspapers. To prepare for this immense digitization effort, in May 2007 the DDD project performed market research to collect information from over a dozen companies on the current state-of-art in the field of newspaper digitization.3 Focal points in this survey of current practices included: digital imaging technology, OCR, zoning and segmentation, metadata extraction, searchability and web delivery systems. As part of the research, companies in the business of newspaper digitization were surveyed4 and, some of the companies took part in additional information sessions with the KB DDD project team in order to provide more in-depth data than could be obtained by the survey alone. This article reports on the results of both the survey and the information sessions.