Leading Israeli newspaper collection to be digitised

Citation

(2000), "Leading Israeli newspaper collection to be digitised", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 28 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2000.12228bab.009

Leading Israeli newspaper collection to be digitised

Leading Israeli newspaper collection to be digitised

Keywords Newspaper publishing, Libraries, Information retrieval, Electronic publishing

The National and University Library in Israel has preserved nearly 60 years of the newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth (1939-1998) on microfilm. Preservation Resources, a division of OCLC, has been awarded the contract by Yedioth Information Technologies to digitise the whole collection.

The project is designed to provide electronic access to the complete run of Yedioth Aharonoth, currently the largest circulation daily newspaper in Israel. Over 800 reels of microfilm will have to be scanned which will produce over 850,000 bitonal digital images.

"Since it began publication in December 1939 Yedioth Aharonoth has been recording the political, cultural and social life of this country with all its eventful and dramatic history", said Yossi Bardosh, project co-ordinator for the Yedioth project. "By making the entire backfile accessible electronically, this project will enable interested users to browse, search and retrieve relevant information with great accuracy and comprehensiveness."

Meg Bellinger, president of Preservation Resources commented: "This procedure assures the availability of both page-images and page-contents. The high quality digital files will form the foundation for the electronic access to the newspaper."

More information about the project can be found through OCLC's Web site at: http://www.oclc.org

Source: Press release