Papers Past contains nearly 2 million digitised pages from historical New Zealand newspapers.
The Library has been investigating options for improving Papers Past. The most important of these improvements is to offer searching of the full text of the newspapers. On the original site users could only browse the newspapers, and could not search for articles relating to the topics they are interested in.
Optical character recognition technology
Software is now available that can turn page images into searchable text through a process called optical character recognition (OCR).
This technology is improving all the time, but historical newspapers present difficulties due to their large size and other factors such as poor print quality and complex formats (for example, some newspaper have up to eight columns on each page).
OCR pilot project
A pilot project was completed in 2007, involving 14 of the 42 titles on Papers Past. The Library processed around 100,000 images using OCR, which were made publicly available on a new Papers Past website in September 2007.
In 2009 the Library converted the existing titles and made all the content full text searchable.
Benefits
Some of the benefits for Papers Past users are:
- ability to search newspaper text using key words
- easier printing of issues and pages
- faster download for page images
- ability to cite and link to specific articles, not just pages.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is used to provide zooming, saving, and emailing functions. This replaced the previous tool that required a special download and did not work on all types of computer.
