ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online

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AustriaN Newspapers Online
ANNO

founding August 2003
Duration 636 newspapers and magazines with 1,100,000 issues as of February 2015
Library type Digital library
place Vienna
operator Austrian National Library
management Christa Müller
Website anno.onb.ac.at

ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online is a project of the Austrian National Library for the retro-digitization of Austrian historical newspapers and magazines . The project went online with 15 newspapers in August 2003; in February 2015, over a million issues of 636 different newspapers and magazines were free and readable and downloadable in full text on the project website . The oldest editions date from 1568, with a few exceptions the editions offered must be at least 70 years old for copyright reasons.

The aim of the project is primarily to improve the accessibility of digitized newspapers and magazines, but also to preserve the originals, which after digitization are only used by library visitors in special cases. As part of ANNO, individual valuable objects or objects requested by users are not retro-digitized; as can be seen from the numbers, it is one of the mass digitization projects of the Austrian National Library.

Most of the scans are made by a service provider and checked, processed and put online by the National Library. During the course of the project, a start was made on converting the image files into text using text recognition programs. Up to now, around 8 million of the over 14 million newspaper and magazine pages from the periods 1689 to 1918 and 1938 to 1944 are not only available as an image file, but also as a searchable text file. The gradual expansion of the full-text search was planned until the end of 2015, from then on all existing scans should be OCR read and all new newspapers and magazines should be searchable immediately.

use

The newspapers and magazines placed online can be accessed on the ANNO website via various search points. If you know a title you want by name, you can find it using an alphabetical list. A second possibility is to call up a desired day using a calendar, under which all newspapers available for that day are then displayed. After selecting a year, the journals are listed below the calendar. Since 2013, the magazines and newspapers have also been provided with keywords from the common authority file so that relevant titles can be found . For example, titles relating to the subject areas “fire brigade”, “architecture” or “agriculture” can be found within the “thematic search”. Using the “full text search”, part of the holdings (with a year of publication between 1689 and 1918 and between 1938 and 1944) can also be searched for text, although the quality of the texts is very different. This fact is due to the current state of development of text recognition software for older prints as well as to the often very poor print quality of older newspapers. The newspapers and magazines that are available in the OCR-read full text can also be searched in the digital reading room of the National Library. For some titles, the table of contents is also recorded in text form, in such cases individual articles and their authors can also be searched. In addition to searching for titles, dates and full-text searches, you can also search for places of publication and languages. An interactive world map is also available to search for places of publication.

The stocks offered can not only be viewed online, the high-resolution image files can also be downloaded in JPEG file format . Entire issues can be downloaded as PDF files, whereby the page range can be selected. In addition, the (pure) text of a displayed page can be called up.

Recovery - Copyright

The Austrian National Library keeps content and digital copies of its holdings available online on its website. The Austrian National Library does not assert its own copyright exploitation rights to this content. In this respect, it also expressly agrees to subsequent use of this content in the accessible web resolution. This also applies to the use of this content in online forums, blogs and in social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. The content may therefore also be used in Wikipedia. Exceptions are scans created by the cooperation partner Google. There this consent to re-use applies with the restriction that the scans may only be used for non-commercial purposes, which contradicts the CC-BY-SA license .

Duration

In 2013 there were over 500 different newspaper and magazine titles online, of which a total of over 500,000 were available. However, the stock has been continuously expanded since then. At the end of the starting year 2003 there were 15 different titles with over 49,000 issues and 700,000 pages.

In accordance with the collection mandate and the strategic goals of the Austrian National Library, newspapers and magazines are online that have appeared in the present and former borders of Austria. Primarily, titles are digitized whose print edition is in poor physical condition (cover or paper) and of which no microfilm edition or only a poor quality microfilm edition has been produced. As soon as the digital edition goes online, the print editions are blocked for use and stored in separate magazines. Furthermore, titles whose print version is used frequently and titles for whose digitization cooperation partners are found have priority. Due to copyright reasons, the publication years of the titles on offer are limited to the period up to 70 years ago. For example, the editions of 1942 were added for readers in 2013, the year 1943 in 2014, etc. Exceptions are titles for which additional agreements have been concluded with the legal successors or the current rights holders. In 2014, ANNO offers editions in 12 different languages. In 2014, around 3 million of the newspaper pages offered were available in OCR-read full text.

The most extensive titles in 2013 were the Wiener Zeitung with more than one million pages, followed by the Neue Freie Presse with over 600,000, the Prager Tagblatt with over 400,000, the Innsbrucker Nachrichten with over 300,000 and the Linzer Tages-Post with around 250,000 pages. The front runner among the days has been July 15, 1916 since 2013, for which 68 different newspaper editions can be viewed. The oldest title in the digital inventory is the Fuggerzeitung , which was handwritten from 1568 onwards. In 2005, the magazine “Zeitgeschichte” was the first recent Austrian specialist magazine to be included in the digital inventory.

Before uploading, the scans are quality controlled by the National Library. Nevertheless, there may be defects and errors, for example if the printed originals are defective or incomplete.

Accesses

The annual accesses to ANNO in millions (the measurement methods for the access statistics of the ÖNB were changed in 2007 and 2012)

While ANNO was visited by an average of 250 readers per day in the first year (2003), in 2014 it was already around 2,500. Of these, 25% stayed longer than half an hour, 10% even longer than a full hour. The remaining 65% checked something in less time. The calls of a single day amount to more than 6400 entries in a library magazine, a number of entries that a physical library can hardly handle.

Organization and administration

The employees of the National Library responsible for the ANNO project belong to the “Digital Services” department within the “Digital Library” main department. ANNO is largely financed from the budget of the national library.

Like the other digitization activities of the Austrian National Library, ANNO also follows the idea of ​​an information society for everyone and the democratization of knowledge, which is funded by the EU as part of the i2010 program .

Cooperating libraries

In the course of the project, all issues of certain newspapers and magazines will be scanned and put online. If the National Library does not itself have all the editions, the missing copies will be made available by one of the numerous cooperating libraries. The technical methods used allow gaps to be filled in retrospectively. The cooperation with the cooperation partners makes it possible for the first time to make an overview of newspapers and magazines accessible, the print editions of which are distributed in different locations and are not completely available in any library.

Protection of the printed originals

The digitization of newspapers and magazines not only serves to make them freely accessible via the WWW , but also to protect the printed originals. The print editions, which are often hundreds of years old, are large-format and, as is customary in libraries, the individual editions of a month or a year were bound into a book volume. The large format and the age are the reasons that the bindings are in poor condition, the paper becomes brittle and crumbles. A particularly poor paper quality in general are printed between 1850 and 1950, which also applies to newspapers and magazines. It is possible to protect the already digitized holdings by excluding them from use and placing them in separate magazines, where they are still kept and preserved. As soon as the digital copies are available via ANNO, the printed editions will also be excluded from borrowing in other libraries.

Workflow and technology

As part of ANNO, unselected valuable or particularly sought-after titles are digitized; it is a mass digitization project. Therefore, from the beginning, we worked on methods, software and a workflow that make a digitization project aimed at masses possible.

Scans

Based on the result of a cost-benefit analysis, the Austrian National Library does not scan, but rather an Austrian scanning service provider. The company collects and returns newspaper volumes on a weekly basis. Around one million pages are scanned each year, the service provider uses different scanning devices for different scanning processes and the different sizes of the newspaper volumes to be scanned. Volumes that are rarely found in Austrian libraries, of which the National Library may have the only copies in the world, are digitized using the usual incident light method. The opened volumes are scanned from above. A different procedure is used in the case of newspaper collections that are frequently available and of which the National Library can obtain a foreign copy. The book block of the copies to be scanned is released from the book cover and the binding is then cut away. The resulting single sheets can now be scanned in a continuous process, which produces higher quality digital copies and is much cheaper and faster than the incident light process. The volumes cut open for the purpose of the process are exclusively copies made available by the cooperating libraries. For a simple calculation, all ancillary costs (transport, data media, cutting the volumes, etc.) are included in the price of a scanned newspaper page according to the tender .

In 2013, newspaper titles were first put online that were scanned as part of the public-private partnership Austrian Books Online (ABO). It started with 50 titles, which are not only relevant for the ABO project but also for ANNO. They can be accessed via the pages of both projects, but also via the Google Books digital library . For ANNO, these titles are prepared in such a way that - as is usual with ANNO - they can also be accessed via the publication date of each individual issue. In contrast to the other titles, the newspapers whose digital copies were taken over from the ABO project - according to the contract with Google - may only be used for personal and not for commercial purposes.

Processing and presentation of the scans

Since 2003, the scans have been made accessible via a web application developed by the National Library . In 2013, the scans occupied seven terabytes , and new storage space is only acquired when there is a specific need. In the background of ANNO there is no classic database , the structured view (e.g. according to calendar days) is generated for the majority of the titles by naming the files and their folders. The files and folders are created and named by the scan service provider directly during the scan. Before uploading to ANNO, the National Library checks the logical structure, the technical readability and the quality of the scans. Only the original scans are saved on the server ; the conversion into the view possible using the web application in various formats and sizes takes place on-the-fly .

In order to also be able to integrate unstructured scans from other projects (such as the ABO project) in ANNO, a dedicated application software was developed with which these digitized files can be structured afterwards. For restructuring, the individual expenses must be recorded within a band by employees and marked with structural information (such as the date). Inputs are used to create an XML document that primarily contains the information on which side of the tape a particular output begins. Subsequent structuring is necessary for scans that were created as part of the ABO project and for protective digitized items such as the Fugger newspaper (digitization of endangered holdings) produced by the National Library itself. Both the images of the ABO project and those of the digital protection files are on different servers than the rest of the ANNO scans.

Cooperations, project participation and networking

Cooperation partner

In the course of the project, the National Library works with numerous educational and cultural institutions (especially libraries). The cooperation partners contribute, for example, newspaper editions that are not available at the National Library for digitization and sometimes also cover scanning costs.

Project participation

Like numerous other important European libraries, the Austrian National Library takes part in the Europeana Newspapers project, which aims to collect information and full texts from European newspapers and magazines and make them freely available. It is planned that this digital magazine library from ANNO will be provided with around 1.6 million full-text searchable pages. In total, Europeana Newspapers is to make around 18 million pages accessible in 2015.

Another Europeana project is to collect over 400,000 digital objects (such as scanned texts, posters and leaflets) from 1914–1918 , the originals of which were created at the time of the First World War . ANNO digitizes newspapers and magazines from the years 1914 to 1918 for the project. Europeana Travel is a similar project, which makes digital materials on the subject of travel and tourism accessible. Around 300,000 newspaper and magazine pages are contributed by ANNO.

Networking

Analyzes have shown that many links lead to ANNO, especially from Wikipedia entries. Here, ANNO digital copies are cited by the Wikipedia authors as evidence for the treatment of historical events, biographies and the description of buildings. Conversely, the corresponding Wikipedia entry is linked on the ANNO information page for the respective newspaper - if available. Due to the numerous cross-references between Wikipedia and ANNO, the ÖNB started to create Wikipedia articles on magazines instead of corresponding articles on its own website.

Headings and Actions

Since the end of 2011, short articles under the title "ANNOdazumal" have been published on the ANNO website, which refer to historical events that are reported in already digitized titles or that have specific historical newspapers on the subject. The tenth anniversary of ANNO was celebrated in August 2013 with an anniversary campaign, in which readers could search for the bizarre reports in ANNO and submit them to a competition.

history

Since it would have exceeded the capacity of the Austrian National Library to scan around one million newspaper pages annually, it was decided at the end of 2002 after a cost-benefit calculation to put out a corresponding contract across the EU. The best bidder was the Austrian scanning service provider EMD, which according to the tender was supposed to produce microfilms and digital copies of the historical newspaper collections at the same time . At the beginning of 2003 the web application "ANNO" was developed by two employees of the national library in order to make the scans accessible to the readers. At the 2003 IFLA conference in Berlin , it was presented to the specialist audience, and shortly afterwards to the public. The reason for a new in-house development was that the solutions available at the time were either too complex to maintain or could not meet the goal of the lowest possible requirements (no searchable text, but images, no user administration, no processing tools).

ANNO went online in August 2003 and was the Austrian National Library's first mass digitization project, at the same time one of the largest in Europe and the first step towards today's “Digital Reading Room” of the National Library. Even before the ANNO project, some employees were able to gain experience in mass digitization by retro-converting the card catalogs , when around six million index cards were scanned from 1997 onwards.

In the meantime, newspapers and magazines as well as other digital collections were accessible via the ANNO web application. Historical legal texts have also been presented on ANNO since September 2004, and only since they were outsourced in autumn 2006 have these digital copies been available online via the ALEX portal - historical legal and legal texts . Also accessible via ANNO in the past were books that were first editions of Austrian literature. In 2005, 450 digitized, copyright-free first editions could be read in the ANNO portal using its own ANNO application software . There were also around 100 early Esperanto prints. These holdings are now no longer accessible via ANNO, but via the “digital reading room” of the national library.

In 2011 there was an optical and technical relaunch and the design of both ANNO and ALEX websites was standardized. The full-text search function was developed in a beta version in spring 2013 and implemented for around 50 newspaper titles with around 800,000 pages. Since then it has been greatly expanded and improved.

Digitized newspapers and magazines

Multilingual and foreign language

literature

  • Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library. In: Newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe , Saur, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-598-21841-9 , pp. 141-148.
  • Christa Müller: Anno - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Objectives, methods and results. In: Archives Et Bibliotheques De Belgique , Volume 78, Issue 1-4, 2007, ISSN  0775-0722 , pp. 175-183.
  • Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. A newspaper mass digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library. Why digitize libraries. In: German-speaking public and press in Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe ( 1848-1948 ) (= Jassyer contributions to German studies. Volume 12). Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press, Iaşi 2008, ISBN 978-973-703-303-1 , pp. 541-551.
  • Christa Müller: Anno. The virtual newspaper reading room of the Austrian National Library. In: Collezioni digitali di periodici in Italia e in Europe. Standard, applicazioni, valutazioni, prospettive. Atti del Convegno, Arco, November 15-16, 2007 (= Documenti di lavoro di Trentino cultura. Volume 20). Giunta, Trento 2009, pp. 105-109.
  • Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report. In: Yearbook for Communication History , Volume 15, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2013, ISSN  1438-4485 , pp. 139–161.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 152.
  2. Use , ÖNB. Retrieved July 24, 2020.
  3. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 150.
  4. 2003 - Annual Report (Part 1) ( Memento of March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 9 and 2003 - Annual Report (Part 2) ( Memento of September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 24, both accessed on July 8, 2014.
  5. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 145 f.
  6. Helmut Spudich: Second Life for old newspapers . In: Der Standard , October 14, 2009, accessed online on July 4, 2014.
  7. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. A newspaper mass digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library. Why digitize libraries , 2008, p. 545.
  8. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 150.
  9. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 150.
  10. 2005 - Annual Report (Part 2) ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 27, accessed on July 8, 2014.
  11. Annual reports of the ÖNB from 2003 to 2013 ( Memento from June 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on July 8, 2014.
  12. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 146.
  13. 2006 - Annual Report (Part 2) ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 24, accessed on July 7, 2014.
  14. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 142; Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. A newspaper mass digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library. Why digitize libraries , 2008, p. 543.
  15. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 142; Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. A newspaper mass digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library. Why digitize libraries , 2008, p. 543 f.
  16. a b 2004 - Annual Report ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 24, accessed on July 7, 2014.
  17. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 147.
  18. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 149.
  19. What is ANNO? , accessed on the project page on July 4, 2014.
  20. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 149.
  21. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 150.
  22. ^ Project participation , accessed on the ANNO website on July 4, 2014.
  23. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 149.
  24. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 152.
  25. Cooperation partner , accessed on the ANNO website on July 7, 2014.
  26. ^ Project participation , accessed on the ANNO website on July 4, 2014.
  27. ^ Project participation , accessed on the ANNO website on July 4, 2014.
  28. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 151.
  29. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 147.
  30. ^ Through a lecture at the post conference Newspapers and the press in Central and Eastern Europe. Access and preservation by Christa Müller: Anno - AustriaN Newspapers Online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library ( presentation Powerpoint ; 1.2 MB; German).
  31. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 149.
  32. Christa Müller: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historical Austrian newspapers and magazines online. A digitization initiative of the Austrian National Library , 2005, p. 141.
  33. Josef Pauser: ALEX - The online portal of the Austrian National Library for historical legal and legal texts . In: Working Group of Parliament and Authority Libraries (Ed.): Arbeitshefte , Volume 58, 2008, ISSN  0518-2220 , pp. 44–57 ( PDF ; 1.0 MB).
  34. 2005 - Annual Report (Part 1) ( Memento of March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 9 and 2005 - Annual Report (Part 2) ( Memento of March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , p. 27, both accessed on July 8, 2014.
  35. 2011 - Annual Report ( Memento of April 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) , pp. 11 and 23, accessed on July 7, 2014.
  36. Christa Müller: Old wine in new bottles. The current status of newspaper digitization, an interim report , 2013, p. 152.
  37. For information on inventory and new entries, see New at ANNO , complete, chronologically structured index from August 2003.