Old newspapers are priceless memory banks and almost every aspect of life in the past is tucked away somewhere in their pages.
. . . births, marriages and deaths, concerts, outings, lectures, inquests, accidents, funerals, committees, shops, elections, strikes, jobs, communities, sport, crime, gossip, advertisements, weather reports, competitions, openings, speeches, letters, business records, religion, shows, transport . .. .
A typical local newspaper in the 1880s might contain sixteen pages and appear six days a week.
Each page carried approximately 12,000 words so every issue totalled around 200,000 words – the size of a large novel.
In one year, sixty million words were produced on every aspect of local life.
A fantastic resource, but its sheer size means researchers often spend days, weeks, months and even years searching for items on particular people, places or events.
Until now...
New digital technolgies give us the power to search these vast memory banks in faster and more effective ways.
The Times, for example, is available online where a staggering 200 years of text can be searched by keyword in a matter of seconds. High-quality commercial resources like this are expensive to produce and charge high subscription rates, but we believe that similar resources can be produced by volunteer networks at a fraction of the cost.
Our aim is to digitise as many local and regional newspapers from the North of England as possible, publish them online, and make them fully searchable by keyword.
This is where you can help. New Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) is clever but still struggles to read old typefaces. It may recognise anything from 20% to 80% of the words in a old newspaper, depending on the quality of print and microfilm, as well as the layout of the page.
We want to ensure that 100% of the text is recorded.
If we did this using commercial firms, the cost of producing each newspaper page would shoot up by 130%. But if each user of NENA does some editing then costs are kept down and everyone can afford to access
• No high-tech skills are required.
• You simply read texts and check them against originals
• You type in any corrections using an ordinary wordprocessor.
• You can decide to edit a single page, or work through several years! It's entirely up to you. Every contribution helps.
• Online guidance is available and work can be done from your own computer anywhere in the world.
If you are interested and would like to know more, please email us.
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