Making Europe's Historical Newspapers Searchable

This paper provides a rare glimpse into the overall approach for the refinement, i.e. the enrichment of scanned historical newspapers with text and layout recognition, in the Europeana Newspapers project. Within three years, the project processed more than 10 million pages of historical newspapers from 12 national and major libraries to produce the largest open access and fully searchable text collection of digital historical newspapers in Europe. In this, a wide variety of legal, logistical, technical and other challenges were encountered. After introducing the background issues in newspaper digitization in Europe, the paper discusses the technical aspects of refinement in greater detail. It explains what decisions were taken in the design of the large-scale processing workflow to address these challenges, what were the results produced and what were identified as best practices.