Digging out gems from the archives

I recently wrote a piece about about how the Guardian library uses archive material in the paper. It was for the Open door column which is a good place to look if you're interested in reading about the day-to-day business of running a large news operation.

Guardian 190: 1821-2011

The first issue of the Guardian appeared on 5 May 1821. To mark the occasion, @guardianlibrary is tweeting articles from the Guardian and important moments in the paper’s history throughout the month – one per year, starting with 1821 and coming right up to the present. Even the dullest years, 1835 for instance, will get a mention in this rapid run-through of the past couple of centuries. Each tweet will link to an article or image on the Guardian’s new From the archive blog. We’ll tweet several times a day between now and May 30, providing by the end of the month 190 fascinating insights into the way the Guardian has evolved.

See more on the Guardian 190 site.

Digital archives and crowdsourcing

As regular users of newspaper digital archives well know, when a scanned image is turned into text as little as 60% of the resulting article's words can turn up in the right place. It is an irritatant but as the cost of correcting an entire archive is so prohibitive most institutions choose to only do this on an ad hoc basis. However, the National Library of Australia has turned to its users to amend jumbled text in a massive crowdsourcing exercise. This has has seen millions of lines of newspaper text being tweaked thus ensuring more accurate searching.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that the public's help in working on the text has been particularly important over the past few weeks as, with huge areas of Queensland under water, many Australians have been seeking news reports from 1974 - the last time there was flooding on such a massive scale.

A video about the library's project can be see here while an article about how and why libraries should do crowdsourcing appeared in The Magazine of Digital Research. See also how newspapers such as the Guardian engage their readers in similar exercises.

World Cup coverage in The Guardian

Martin Belam writes on Currybetdotnet about a display of Guardian World Cup coverage, compiled by the paper's Research & Information team. The pieces, ranging from 1950 to 2006, include Cup final reports as well all the usual stories - Hand of God, murdered goalkeepers, Gazza's tears etc, etc.

Until a couple of years ago, the task of finding these articles would have involved a nausea-inducing session at the microfilm reader. Thankfully, such projects can now be carried out using the Guardian/Observer digital archive.

Digitising newspapers

In last week's Media Guardian Dan Sabbagh examined James Murdoch's claims that the British Library's plan to digitise newspapers was for commercial gain. Obviously the accusations centre around copyright, but there's an interesting response in today's paper where Ralph Gee notes:

"Most 19th century provincial editors shamelessly lifted from the Times as copies reached them by stagecoach and railway; but London presses reciprocated, for their plunder to be used yet again by other provincials. This very incestuous process is now easily proved."

Indeed it is. Digitisation has completely opened up papers in a way that the original editorial teams could never have imagined. Long may it continue.