24 September 2002
The Royal Library of Sweden Preserve Archived 17th Century Newspapers
The Royal Library of Sweden (Kungliga Biblioteket), the country’s largest and oldest library, is using Convera’s RetrievalWare® as part of a Nordic-wide initiative to preserve and make publicly available thousands of archived newspapers from the 17th century.
To support “The Tiden Project,” Sweden’s national library has deployed Convera’s RetrievalWare® search technology on its Web site to enable users to search for and retrieve digitised newspapers dating from 1645 to 1721, as well as some pre-newspaper era publications from 1625 to 1645.
To build its electronic archive, the library first uses an external source to turn its microfilm documents and original newspapers into digital TIF or PDF images. The TIF and PDF files then are fed through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program that converts printed words into an electronic text file that can be stored and made available over the Internet. Due to the large volume of errors still generated by OCR software, the library needed a way to avoid manually fixing the errors inherent in a large scanning project.
"Because 16th Century gothic writing is extremely ornate and the publications are often in poor condition, it is sometimes difficult for OCR programs to process this material accurately," said Bengt Neiss, the Library’s Project Leader. "We didn’t want to spend months correcting chunks of OCR data every time the program didn’t recognise a word or letter.”
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