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Welsh Newspaper Online

Prof Lorna HughesUniversity of Wales Chair in Digital CollectionsNational Library of Wales‘Enabling Access to Digitised Historic Newspapers’British Library, June 9th 2014

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Digital Collections and the National Library of Wales

• Digitisation supports: • Access to Welsh and

Celtic materials by global audience

• Preservation• Collections enhancement

and reunification• Transformation of

scholarship• Community engagement

• A cohesive, national collection

• Underlying principle: free access to digital content

• www.llgc.org.uk

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The National Digital Public Library of Wales

• A cohesive, national collection that is freely available to all

• Based on internal expertise/capacity in the entire digital lifecycle: selection, conservation, capture, management and preservation

• Copyright and other intellectual property rights cleared as a managed part of digitisation process:

– Where material is on deposit and/or the current rights holders are known, permission is requested: where declined, materials are not used; when current rights holder is unknown, reasonable efforts are made to identify and/or contact the rights holder.

• Digitised resources licensed for re-use and re-purposing under an open license (BY-NC-SA): Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Sharealike license

• Free access is key to realising the potential community, social, research and economic benefits of digitised resources

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Papurau Newydd Cymru Arlein | Welsh Newspapers online

http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk #PAPUR

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NLW Newspaper archive

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Conservation: part of digitisation workflow at NLW

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Welsh Newspapers online• 6.8 million articles, 630,000 pages, 92 publications and

growing.• Already funded – over 1 million pages online by Autumn

2014 (funded by WAG, ERDF, JISC).• Coverage: 1804 (The Cambrian, first weekly in Wales) –

1919.• Wales, Borders and Welsh diaspora (USA).• English and Welsh language content (approx. 30%

Welsh).• Out of Beta Autumn 2014.• Free (+ open license).• Europeana Newspapers (Associate Partner, sharing

metadata).• User engagement and analysis – built into planning and

ongoing development.http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk #PAPUR

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Quntinshill rail disaster, Cambrian Daily Leader, May 26th, 1915

http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk #PAPUR

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Quintinshill rail disaster, Y Dydd, May 28th, 1915

http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk #PAPUR

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Next steps for Welsh Newspapers Online

• Big project vision to build inclusive virtual national collection for Wales – integrated with other repositories of Welsh content.

• Share content - Europeana? Wikipedia?• Add value - enrich metadata, user tagging, text

correction, LOD, expose graphic content, geo-location.

• Discovery –new platforms for new devices.• Embedding: new projects using the resource in

research – data mining, historical network analysis; teaching – support use in curriculum.

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Using Welsh Newspapers Online in teaching: Wales at War

http://walesatwar.org

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Cymru 1900 / Wales 1900 Developing a a gazetteer of Welsh place names from OS 6 inch maps using Zooniverse platform – launched October 2013

CrowdsourcingSourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) through an open call: e.g., to help capture, systematize or analyse large amounts of data (“citizen science”)

cymru1900wales.org

@cymru1900wales

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Using Welsh Newspapers Online data with digital tools and methods for research• Approaches to data

mining one million pages of Welsh Newspapers Online

• Enabling the large-scale analysis of spatial and temporal data

• Also investigating Historical Network Analysis of data

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The power of archives in the digital age

• “Most people look at history like a performance on a stage. They don’t look behind the curtains to see what is really happening. Museums and libraries are windows onto the truth.”

• Sun Xun, 29/11 2013, New York Times