Breaking the Browsing Barrier for Historic Searching of Newspaper Texts
Access status:
Open Access
Type
Conference paperAuthor/s
Keegan, Te TakaAbstract
Traditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand's encounter history received a boost when in 1996 the Alexander Turnbull ...
See moreTraditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand's encounter history received a boost when in 1996 the Alexander Turnbull library produced a collection on microfiche totalling almost 18,000 pages and covering a printing period from 1842 to 1933. While having all the newspapers in a single collection was a large step forward, browsing or searching for information in this microfiche collection was still time consuming. By incorporating the collection into a digital library with an Internet interface, and by enabling full-text search, we have broken this browsing barrier. Making the information available this way is even more significant as the majority of the collection is written in the Maori language; we have created a Maori language resource that is sorely needed by education institutes, and one that provides quick and accurate access to the previously obscure source. The process involved in developing this unique digital library collection, the advantages of traditional newspaper stored in this medium, and the possibilities that we intend to investigate in the future, will be discussed in this paper.
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See moreTraditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand's encounter history received a boost when in 1996 the Alexander Turnbull library produced a collection on microfiche totalling almost 18,000 pages and covering a printing period from 1842 to 1933. While having all the newspapers in a single collection was a large step forward, browsing or searching for information in this microfiche collection was still time consuming. By incorporating the collection into a digital library with an Internet interface, and by enabling full-text search, we have broken this browsing barrier. Making the information available this way is even more significant as the majority of the collection is written in the Maori language; we have created a Maori language resource that is sorely needed by education institutes, and one that provides quick and accurate access to the previously obscure source. The process involved in developing this unique digital library collection, the advantages of traditional newspaper stored in this medium, and the possibilities that we intend to investigate in the future, will be discussed in this paper.
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Date
2001-01-01Publisher
Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney.Licence
Copyright the University of SydneyCitation
Computing Arts 2001 : digital resources for research in the humanities : 26th-28th September 2001, Veterinary Science Conference Centre, the University of Sydney / hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of SydneySubjects
Humanities ComputingShare