International Newspaper Librarianship for the 21st Century

This volume consists of presentations at recent events of the IFLA Newspaper Section and documents the variety and intensity of newspaper activities worldwide. Newspapers are still not liked by a large number of librarians and archivists because they are labour and staff intensive, and that means cost intensive. Also they take a lot of shelf space, they need special treatment for preservation, and they should be microfilmed … During the last years a most encouraging development has taken place which seems to release newspapers from their Cinderella position: The progress of digitization and text management has opened up a promising market. Several major business companies have digitized large amounts of newspapers and are offering newspaper contents to wide audience. Considering that newspapers are among the most important often unique (even if not always reliable) historical source materials the success of such ventures is hardly surprising. Thanks to OCR treatment of the newspaper files people can now find details of their local history and their family easily, not to speak of scholarly purposes. Were newspaper-related subjects avoided by PH.D. Candidates in previous times because the tracking down of individual papers and the reading of many reels of film were estimated as an additional two years of labour, things have become so much easier: newspapers are now among the most preferred sources as the information is available by a mouse click – provided the newspaper was digitized. The current state of digitization worldwide is encouraging: After the spectacular success of the Scandinavian TIDEN project, major national projects are under way, especially in Great Britain and the United States. But other countries have been active, too: Estonia and Lithuania have been digitizing newspapers, in Latin America the Grand Colombia project was concluded successfully, and China is catching up at an amazing speed. Not to forget Luxembourg where the national papers are currently digitized. The projected 2006 International Digitization Conference in Salt Lake City, which is co-organized by the Newspaper Section, is expected to provide the latest information both on the current projects as well as the technological progress.