Comments on: Australian Newspapers Beta

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:03:37 +0000

That's great -- thanks Ky.

By: Ky

Ky — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:19:13 +0000

Take a look at what http://www.nambour-chronicle.com is doing. It's an archive of the Nambour Chronicle & North Coast Advertiser first published in 1903.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:08:05 +0000

Yes, like the Hansard project (another excellent British project which I could have mentioned), it seems they are starting off with a limited dataset for testing purposes. Though it all looks very polished for a beta, I have to say! At least the Argus was one of the big newspapers, in its day -- I was looking for an online version a few months ago, though I now can't remember what I wanted it for ...

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:18:06 +0000

I know that TNA are thinking about going along the route of making their index audience-correctable, but they are still thinking about the authority issue.

That Aussie newspapers site is great, although I could really do with some more Victoria stuff.

By: Bob Meade

Bob Meade — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 06:44:54 +0000

Thanks for pointing this beta programme out Brett. This will be a great resource.

And yes, the Powerhouse Musuem is going great guns. There are some very talented and highly skilled people behind that, like Seb Chan their web services manager.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:34:35 +0000

Fair enough, and Your Archives is an excellent idea too. On the other hand, moremoremoremore

By: Alan Allport

Alan Allport — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:04:56 +0000

Credit where credit's due, though ... the IWM Sound Archive has now digitized most of its on-site holdings, which makes browsing through them much, much easier than it used to be. When I visited as recently as 2005 they were still relying on boxes of clunky cassette tapes.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:09:33 +0000

Yes, it's a great thing, and hopefully will inspire other libraries and institutions to follow the same path. I should have noted that of course there are other newspaper (and book) digitisation projects going on around the world, but so many of them are crippled in some way -- either not-free or with annoying limited previews. Which I can understand for things under copyright, but not everything is. Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive are definitely the best of the bunch in this regard. Gavin: Yes, it's a brilliant feature, although given the number of OCR errors I wonder whether there will ever be enough users to correct the text in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, OCR software continues to improve and that can be re-applied to the database in future. On the question of redistribution of uploaded content, Australian Newspapers has the following in its terms of service:

Creative Commons Share and Share Alike license. As a user of the Australian Newspapers Service you grant to NLA a non-exclusive license to distribute, copy and preserve your content under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License.

Which is just what you want to see.

By: Paul Gilster

Paul Gilster — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:33:29 +0000

What a remarkable resource! Getting older materials online like this should be a priority around the world, and I hope this project's reputation will quickly spread.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:17:54 +0000

That sounds fantastic. I'm particularly impressed by them letting users supply corrections. I got the impression from a survey that I filled in for the PRO that they might be thinking about letting users correct the Documents Online index (and it really does need lots of corrections - especially the WWI medal cards) but so far I don't think any British organization has actually done it. The same survey also had questions relating to users uploading their own digital images, which could be good unless others have to pay to download them.