Staff Report

An international team comprised of the Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Center, the Malibu hybrid libraries project, the British Library Newspaper Library, OCLC Preservation Resources and Olive Software Inc. has been working together to produce an online facsimile library of historic newspapers.

The project’s goal is to open up the British Library’s historic newspaper collection to the general public via the Web, while preserving the look and feel of the original content. In the first stage, historic microfilmed newspaper pages containing some 500,000 articles will be digitized and made available online.

Precision scanning of microfilm to high-quality TIFF was performed by OCLC and Oxford University, while Olive’s ActivePaper Archive software is being used to automatically convert newspaper pages to eXtensible Markup Language. Traditionally, XML holds text and its structure, but ActivePaper Archive goes further by tying the XML to images.

The product uses three XML layers — one based on the NewsML/NITF standards, one on the Dublin Core, and a third on PRML, or Preservation Markup Language. PRML maps the newspaper’s layout, recording coordinates for each piece of text and each page object.

For the end user, this means a keyword search yields a clip of the article in its original form, tied to the page and full issue in which it first appeared — something that’s never been possible before.

“The reactions of people are overwhelmingly positive, with some even describing the project as ‘inspirational,’” said Marilyn Deegan of the University of Oxford. “I think that Olive Software has discovered the future of electronic delivery of highly complex printed documents.”

Edmund King, head of the British Library Newspaper Library, commented: “For many years, The British Library Newspaper Library has wanted its users to have greater accessibility to scanned texts. Olive Software’s technology offers us and other libraries the potential to provide this.”