Newspapers of the World Online: US and International Perspectives. Proceedings of Conferences in Salt Lake City and Seoul, 2006

Citation

Paull, J. (2008), "Newspapers of the World Online: US and International Perspectives. Proceedings of Conferences in Salt Lake City and Seoul, 2006", Library Management, Vol. 29 No. 1/2, pp. 135-137. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120810844748

There can be little dispute that digitization is a key topic worldwide. For some years now it has shaped and challenged developments in newspaper librarianship – a traditionally thorny area given the problems of space and preservation newspapers bring to questions of access. Microfilm, while ensuring preservation, is not user‐friendly for readers and has been dogged with problems of poor quality, incomplete sets and inconsistent formats. Digitization offers a cost‐effective means for addressing these problems. Furthermore, it provides opportunities for developing searchable formats on the Internet. Finally, since some newspapers and other internet material are designed exclusively for digital circulation, electronic mass storage is now an almost unavoidable option for libraries.

Part of the IFLA Publications series, this volume addresses the field of newspaper digitization by bringing together a range of papers that were presented at two separate international conferences held in 2006. Together, these papers provide up‐to‐date information on newspaper digitization from specialists all over the world.

As many of the papers in this volume testify, newspapers have long been among the most important of all media. They are also among the most varied in terms of content (regional, national and international, for example) and format. The era of the internet, however, has brought the issue of printed newspapers to a crossroads. New modes of storage and software, new audiences and changing business models are today as much a challenge to publishers as they are to libraries.

If the imperative to respond appropriately to the rapidly changing industry unifies this volume, each paper offers a more granular discussion of emerging problems, challenges and positive developments. The papers describe, often in great technical detail, specific digitization projects relating to historical newspapers. It is consistently recognized that the process should involve extensive preparation in the assessment of source material and the provision of user‐friendly web site design. The needs of the user are of paramount importance, and so the topic of interface is a recurring theme. Almost all contributors acknowledge high quality microfilming as a platform for successful digitization. Other recurring topics include text searching and formatting, Optical Character Recognition, the gathering of metadata, funding, intellectual property rights, and community consultation.

Although the primary aim of this work is to document recent trends in international newspaper digitization, many of the papers responded to the opportunity the conferences gave to address historical holdings. The contribution of the editor, Hartmut Walravens, is particularly strong. His report on digital holdings covers archives in many countries including Germany, Austria, Latvia and the USA (Hawaii). He also provides an interesting survey of Western perceptions of the early East Asian press, and includes an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to archivists and newspaper aficionados.

Digitization raises different questions on the strengths and problems of electronic storage. The provision of adequate funding will always be an important topic, especially when high quality production is sought. Multi‐institutional cooperative effort is most likely required to fuel such projects. The majority of contributions testify to the abiding popularity of newspapers all over the world. Some of the more perspicacious contributors observe that if information is to remain available to the largest possible public (an information commons), then any purely commercial investment will have to be balanced with a more philanthropic ambition. Questions are also raised on the role of traditional archivists and librarians in the face of the IT department. It is recognized that the development of successful selection criteria will need to take advice from an array of sources including scholars, librarians and teachers.

Readers of this volume should note that some of the papers remain in their original PowerPoint presentation format – a factor that diminishes their readability and renders them less informative than one imagines the final presentations to have been. Another small problem is the occasional misspellings scattered throughout the text. Such matters, however, do not detract from the whole. This is a work that will greatly appeal to information specialists from an array of cultural backgrounds eager for material on recent developments in an important field.