Australian Newspaper Digitisation Project

Following on from Jacinta's article a couple of months back about Google News Archive, I thought this was an interesting article from The Age on the NLA's digitisation of old newspapers (Click here).

The Australian Newspaper Digitisation Project (ANDP) was begun to digitise old newspapers so they'd be keyword searchable. The problem was that OCR software to interpret the microfilmed newspapers wasn't 100% reliable and many errors occurred in the 'translation'. That is when the National Library hit on the idea of allowing the public to tidy up the text. Genealogists, amateur historians and online library users (about 3000 of them) are turning on their computers for up to 50 hours a week and making corrections to the texts, as well as subject tagging and even annotating them.

If you'd like to have a look at how the digitisation has progressed check out their website here.

Barbara