[Foundation-l] Old newspapers going to destruction

[Andrew Gray]

2008/10/2 Christophe Henner <christophe.henner at gmail.com>:
> 2008/10/2 Christophe Henner <christophe.henner at gmail.com>:
>> Y aurait-il, selon vous, un moyen d'estimer le cout de numérisation
>> d'une telle collection ?
>>
>
> This was intended to the French Kabaal, sorry.
>
> And for the one who doesn't understand French, I was asking if there
> was anyway to estimate the cost of the digitization of those
> newspaper.

The Colorado State Library gives a rough estimate of $1.25 per page
plus overheads (overall indexing, etc)

http://www.oclc.org/news/events/presentations/2006/microfilm_june2006.ppt

A South Dakota project likewise suggests ~$2

http://library.sd.gov/sdnewspaperdigitization/history.htm

Estimates are a bit fuzzy, because most digitisation is not done
direct from newspapers (which are bulky and not routinely scanned) but
from microfilm, which there's a much better-understood workflow to
handle and which imposes a lot less physical overhead.

An Irish study gives the neat - but high! - estimate that to digitise
two years worth of a single newspaper title would take about one year
and ten staff at a cost of ~300,000 EUR, of which 10% would be capital
investment. I suspect with software automation this could be heavily
reduced.

www.askaboutireland.ie/resources/OCR_DigitisationAndTranscriptionOfNewspapers.pdf

Cornell quote $5-10,000 for a single year of a daily newspaper (albeit
one that only printed during academic terms, so say $10-15,000 for a
"real" daily)

http://newspapers.library.cornell.edu/costs.html

On a more upbeat note, doing the research for this I found reference
to a pan-Scandinavian newspaper digitisation program called "Tiden" -
"...a collaborative project of the Helsinki University Library, the
National Library of Sweden, Statsbiblioteket - the Danish State and
University Library in Aarhus, and the National Library of Norway for
the digitisation of newspapers on microfilm" - but I can't easily find
any more details on it, and the website given has vanished. I suspect
this may be the project that means no-one wants to digitise this
particular collection...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk