The Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program: Helping Communities access and explore their newspaper heritage

Abstract

The paper outlines the work achieved on the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation program to date (http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp). It gives an overview of the processes, methods and technologies that are being utilised in the digitisation process and illustrates with screenshots the development of appropriate infrastructure and software to support the program. Software has been developed to support the workflow, content management and delivery of data. Systems infrastructure has been developed within the context of the Library’s strategic priorities, so that rapid and easy access to both the Library’s collections and other resources can be achieved in a single business model. The service also supports a key objective of the Australian Newspaper Plan (ANPLAN http://www.nla.gov.au/anplan/) “that communities should be able to explore their rich newspaper heritage”. This program will greatly improve access for all Australian’s to historical newspapers and will give users the ability to rapidly and easily search across the newspapers in a freely publicly accessible system.