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This study aims to highlight the potential of digitised historic newspapers.

This paper is a review of digitised historic newspapers as a primary source for marketing historians. It provides a survey of what is available internationally free of charge to the user. It also includes examples of the use of digitised historic newspapers drawn from the author’s own research.

The paper reveals the huge potential for marketing historians of what is now available in a growing number of countries across the world. Much of this material is available free of charge to researchers with a connection to the internet.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to explore digitised historic newspapers as a primary source for marketing historians.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze the digitized newspaper collection at the National Library of Sweden, focusing on cultural heritage as digital noise. In what specific ways are newspapers transformed in the digitization process? If the digitized document is not the same as the source document – is it still a historical record, or is it transformed into something else?

The authors have analyzed the XML files from Aftonbladet 1830 to 1862. The most frequent newspaper words not matching a high-quality references corpus were selected to zoom in on the noisiest part of the paper. The variety of the interpretations generated by optical character recognition (OCR) was examined, as well as texts generated by auto-segmentation. The authors have made a limited ethnographic study of the digitization process.

The research shows that the digital collection of Aftonbladet contains extreme amounts of noise: millions of misinterpreted words generated by OCR, and millions of texts re-edited by the auto-segmentation tool. How the tools work is mostly unknown to the staff involved in the digitization process? Sticking to any idea of a provenance chain is hence impossible, since many steps have been outsourced to unknown factors affecting the source document.

The detail examination of digitally transformed newspapers is valuable to scholars depending on newspaper databases in their research. The paper also highlights the fact that libraries outsourcing digitization processes run the risk of losing control over the quality of their collections.

This study aims to identify user perception of different qualities of optical character recognition (OCR) in texts. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of different quality OCR on users' subjective perception through an interactive information retrieval task with a collection of one digitized historical Finnish newspaper.

This study is based on the simulated work task model used in interactive information retrieval. Thirty-two users made searches to an article collection of Finnish newspaper Uusi Suometar 1869–1918 which consists of ca. 1.45 million autosegmented articles. The article search database had two versions of each article with different quality OCR. Each user performed six pre-formulated and six self-formulated short queries and evaluated subjectively the top 10 results using a graded relevance scale of 0–3. Users were not informed about the OCR quality differences of the otherwise identical articles.

The main result of the study is that improved OCR quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper articles positively: higher relevance scores are given to better-quality texts.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this simulated interactive work task experiment is the first one showing empirically that users' subjective relevance assessments are affected by a change in the quality of an optically read text.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of corpus linguistics and digitised newspaper archives in management and organisational history.

The paper draws its inferences from Google NGram Viewer and five digitised historical newspaper databases – The Times of India, The Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – that contain prints from the nineteenth century.

The paper argues that corpus linguistics or the quantitative and qualitative analysis of large-scale real-world machine-readable text can be an important method of historical research in management studies, especially for discourse analysis. It shows how this method can be fruitfully used for research in management and organisational history, using term count and cluster analysis. In particular, historical databases of digitised newspapers serve as important corpora to understand the evolution of specific words and concepts. Corpus linguistics using newspaper archives can potentially serve as a method for periodisation and triangulation in corporate, analytically structured and serial histories and also foster cross-country comparisons in the evolution of management concepts.

The paper also shows the limitation of the research method and potential robustness checks while using the method.

Findings of this paper can stimulate new ways of conducting research in management history.

The paper for the first time introduces corpus linguistics as a research method in management history.

The paper examines academic historians' information interactions with material from digital historical-newspaper collections as the research process unfolds.

The study employed qualitative analysis from in-depth interviews with Finnish history scholars who use digitised historical newspapers as primary sources for their research. A model for task-based information interaction guided the collection and analysis of data.

The study revealed numerous information interactions within activities related to task-planning, the search process, selecting and working with the items and synthesis and reporting. The information interactions differ with the activities involved, which call for system support mechanisms specific to each activity type. Various activities feature information search, which is an essential research method for those using digital collections in the compilation and analysis of data. Furthermore, application of quantitative methods and multidisciplinary collaboration may be shaping culture in history research toward convergence with the research culture of the natural sciences.

For sustainable digital humanities infrastructure and digital collections, it is of great importance that system designers understand how the collections are accessed, why and their use in the real-world context. The study enriches understanding of the collections' utilisation and advances a theoretical framework for explicating task-based information interaction.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the concepts of digital rights management (DRM) of archives of historical newspapers and the design of a DRM framework to render the content of historical news under the rights of authority.

The paper takes the form of a literature review and system analysis.

The rights management of digital objects involves various levels of application techniques and standards which are more complex than physical ones. This study combines the advantages of both tethered and untethered models to manage the digital rights of historical newspapers. It not only simplifies the management system, but also guarantees the rights when users use different platforms to present these digital objects.

This study designs a simplified DRM framework to protect the rights of digitized contents and to practise the rights scope of online grant for a historical newspaper.

This paper explores the development of a luxury retail shoe brand in Belle Époque Vienna.

Footwear retailing and marketing history is a neglected area. Unfortunately, no business records have survived from Robert Schlesinger’s shoe stores. However, it has been possible to reconstruct the history of the development of the Paprika Schlesinger brand from its extensive advertising in the Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, with the guidance of the founder’s grandson, Prof Robert A. Shaw, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Birkbeck, University of London, England. This case study would not have been possible without the digitization of some major collections of primary sources. In 2014, the European Union’s Europeana digitization initiative launched a new portal via the Library of Europe website which provides access to selected digitized historic newspaper collections in libraries across Europe. The project partners include the Austrian National Library which has digitized full runs of several major historic Austrian newspapers, including the Neue Freie Presse. Other project partners which have digitized historic newspapers which are relevant to this paper are the Landesbibliothek Dr Friedrich Teßmann of Italy’s Südtirol region, the National Library of France and the Berlin State Library. An associate project partner library, the Slovenian National and University Library’s Digital Library of Slovenia, has also digitized relevant historic newspapers. Furthermore, the City of Vienna has digitized a complete set of Vienna city directories as part of its Wienbibliothek Digital project.

This paper suggests that Robert Schlesinger created one of the first European luxury retail shoe brands.

This is the first academic study of the historical development of the advertising and marketing of a European luxury retail shoe brand.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the mission and implementation of digital libraries from an historian's perspective.

This paper summarizes the abstract qualities that historians look for in their sources, and then compares various digital archives both qualitatively and quantitatively, highlighting design features that enhance or detract from the ease of use.

Preservation is the paramount mission of research libraries. Digital interfaces should contain images of original documents, html text documents hold little interest. Site interfaces should enable users to browse and zoom with minimal mouse clicks. Downloadable viewers should be avoided. Simple browsing is more important than keyword searching. Google Books sets the standard for digital information, and digital librarians can measure their site interface by that yardstick.

This paper provides feedback to administrators of digital libraries. It gives library scientists candid opinions from an intensive end user of digital information, contains several practical suggestions, and explains the reasoning behind those suggestions.

By mapping-out the capabilities, challenges and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER), this article aims to synthesise the state of the art of NER in the context of the early modern research field and to inform discussions about the kind of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of the technique going forward.

Through an extensive literature review, this article maps out the current capabilities, challenges and limitations of NER and establishes the state of the art of the technique in the context of the early modern, digitally augmented research field. It also presents a new case study of NER research undertaken by Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's Catalogues of his Collections (2016–2021), a Leverhulme funded research project and collaboration between the British Museum and University College London, with contributing expertise from the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

Currently, it is not possible to benchmark the capabilities of NER as applied to documents of the early modern period. The authors also draw attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, leading them to the conclusion that more robust reporting and critical analysis of NER approaches and findings is required.

This article examines NER as applied to early modern textual sources, which are mostly studied by Humanists. As addressed in this article, detailed reporting of NER processes and outcomes is not necessarily valued by the disciplines of the Humanities, with the result that it can be difficult to locate relevant data and metrics in project outputs. The authors have tried to mitigate this by contacting projects discussed in this paper directly, to further verify the details they report here.

The authors suggest that a forum is needed where tools are evaluated according to community standards. Within the wider NER community, the MUC and ConLL corpora are used for such experimental set-ups and are accompanied by a conference series, and may be seen as a useful model for this. The ultimate nature of such a forum must be discussed with the whole research community of the early modern domain.

NER is an algorithmic intervention that transforms data according to certain rules-, patterns- or training data and ultimately affects how the authors interpret the results. The creation, use and promotion of algorithmic technologies like NER is not a neutral process, and neither is their output A more critical understanding of the role and impact of NER on early modern documents and research and focalization of some of the data- and human-centric aspects of NER routines that are currently overlooked are called for in this paper.

This article presents a state of the art snapshot of NER, its applications and potential, in the context of early modern research. It also seeks to inform discussions about the kinds of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of NER going forward. It draws attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, and concludes that more robust reporting of NER approaches and findings are urgently required. The Appendix sets out a comprehensive summary of digital tools and resources surveyed in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to explore issues and approaches for collection and management of born digital local news. Much local news – important documentation of local history – is being lost. The fact that a lot of news media is now available digitally presents new opportunities but also new challenges for such preservation.

Several specific bottle‐necks for implementing this project are examined. For instance, the size of the problem is estimated by approximating how much local news is generated in one US state. Then the difficulties in capture, storage requirements, selection, access, and sustainability are considered, focusing on difficulties in selection. Finally, a number of business models for handling these challenges are explored.

Currently, there is no large‐scale effort under way to preserve local television and newspaper news stories, and as a result this part of history is being lost. Many practical difficulties to a comprehensive system have been found but there would be value even in a system which was not the ideal. Newspaper web sites and streaming radio stations should be downloaded. The possibility of capturing video from cable distribution points could be explored.

While none of the business models offers an ideal solution for the preservation of local news, especially not for multimedia sources, it is believed that some of them provide partial answers which should be tried.