[Foundation-l] Old newspapers going to destruction

John at Darkstar vacuum at jeb.no
Thu Oct 2 20:03:11 UTC 2008


The National library and the University library at UiO is not the same.
Some of the newspapers in Norway are digitizing the old archives, and I
could check out the cost tomorrow. As I recall they had a discussion,
and I think they both discussed digitizing from microfilm and from real
scans. Parts of one of those collections already existed on microfilm.
Interesting enough, several newspapers are digitizing their collections.
John

Andrew Gray skrev:
> 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...
> 



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