Virtual Library of
Historical Newspapers
Presentation
The Project
The Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers is now one of the main digitization projects being carried out in Spain, with significant international importance in terms of both its size and features.
The project is the result of cooperation between the Directorate General of Books, Archives and Libraries (through the Subdirectorate General for Library Coordination) and Autonomous Regions and scientific and cultural institutions including universities, municipalities, foundations athenaeums and even newspapers publishers with origins dating back to 19th and the beginning of the last century.
From September 2009 the database includes almost 2000 headlines from 50 libraries, with almost five million pages from 145 places where newspapers were printed.
Most of collections are unique and highly interesting to researchers and general public. They are from the last years of the eighteenth century and about a wide range of subjects.
16 Autonomous Regions are represented in the database (Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Canary Islands, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla & Leon, Catalonia, Madrid, Navarra, Region of Valencia, Extremadura, Galicia, Balearic Islands, La Rioja, Basque country and Region of Murcia), 47 provinces and 145 towns. The Ministry of Culture is going to include gradually collections from other Autonomous Regions and provinces that at the present still are not represented.
Preservation and diffusion
The project has two main objetives: preserving bibliographic materials that are in danger of dissappearing due to their physical characteristics and disseminating in the wider way resources of information that are widely used by researchers and citizens in general.
Although the effects of paper acidity are not widely known, because paper is obtained from cellulose paste when it comes into contact with air it breaks down significantly, to the point that the degradation process is known at international preservation and conservation centres as the "slow fire" effect. Not only does this paper suffer as a result of this acidity, but it also tends to be of poor quality, as when it was printed it was intended to be used immediately and was not intended to be kept for long periods of time.
Additionally, constant use by researchers and the public in general has led to further deterioration of these bibliographic documents that are often not only those most popularly looked at in libraries, but also the ones most often photocopied. The effects of light on these delicate materials are significantly damaging.
It is this public demand and the fragility of the materials that make it advisable to use all the facilities provided by computer technology to search, retrieve and view the information and make digital copies accessible to all on the World Wide Web.
Imagen: Gerunda. Revista quincenal de ciencias, artes y literatura. 1901.
Technical features
It was therefore necessary to digitalize the materials and undertake a complete process for data and metadata assignment that enhanced the use of search and retrieval of information in a virtual enviroment. Therefore, a large number of metadata schemas for different purposes were added to the MARC format, ranging from MARC XML for bibliographic description to Dublin Core/ISO 15836:2003 for retrieval of the information to METS http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ for transmission of metadata and even to PREMIS http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/pmwg/ for future policies for long-term preservation.
Using the standard MARC21XML, bibliographic records and its holdings have been described to a level rarely seen in traditional catalogues. This was made possible by making the bibliographic description coincide with the digitalization and validation of each and every page in each copy of each newspaper in the up to six levels of enumeration and chronology established by MARC format for holdings records also based on ISO 10324 and NISO Z39.71 standards.
The creation of Dublin Core schemas files allows permanent feeding to the BVPH OAI-PMH repository, that can be gathered by the most important harvesters, and it’s an OAI data provider in http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites as well as OAISter http://www.oaister.org/viewcolls.html.
In addition, the structure of OAI-PMH and Dublin Core enables SiteMaps to be established with search engines, including Google and Yahoo, which gives high visibility to the records contained in the Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers database rather than to the database, which can be harvested directly by the search engines.
The METS used for exchanging metadata collections, encapsulating the description of data in MARC format, the addresses of multipage files making up the digital images, the management of rights through the METSRight schema and, another significant contribution, the PREMIS metadata schemas, are also complemented by the use of a SRU/SRW server, pioneering in Spain after the Virtual Library of Bibliographic Heritage http://bvpb.mcu.es and are fully compliant with international initiatives for information access allowing the architecture client server Z39.50 to be surpassed. They were recently defined by the OAIS as an additional web service.
There is also the possibility of establishing important synergies between the OAI repository and the SRU server, an approach currently under development.
Finally, three important improvements have been added in the over the past year. Firstly, multilingual access to information is highly visible in the Virtual Library Bibliographical Heritage, but less so in the Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers, although it does occur in cases where equivalences have been established following the MARC format and the VIAF methodology.
The second is the addition of PDF files which allow for differentiated reviews of the JPEG format and that, for some searches and purposes, can be more useful.
The third is the start of the OCR project, according to the standard. In this case it is METS / ALTO, which is also used in the main historical Newspapers digitalization projects such as those being carried out in the USA, UK, France, The Netherlands and Australia.
Imagen: La Física Moderna. Revista mensual ilustrada. 1887.
The new RSS aggegators systems will be very useful to users, keeping them up to date with new additions to the database. In the future, the strategy for creating digital repositories throughout Spain sponsored by the Subdirectorate General for Library Coordination and harvested through the Harvester of Digital Collections and Electronic Resources http://hispana.mcu.es may lead to more continuous, regular additions being made to the virtual library rather than the current massive loading.
This gives users a tool enabling them to access one of the richest and most varied sources of information that comprises a true sociological record of everyday matters that will doubtless mean savings in time, effort and money for users. At the same time highly fragile bibliographic materials are being preserved.
The large number of new projects, developments and improved functions mean it is reasonable to expect this database to grow in both volume and in terms of the information management tools available, achieving a dynamic balance between the rights of the user to access the information and the needs of the documents to survive.
Finally, it must be stressed that this project is of a entirely cooperative nature, and is the result of a policy for developing digital collections. This is promoted jointly by Autonomous Regions and the Ministry of Culture, through the Subdirectorate General for Library Coordination, in reaching its goal, which is of course the satisfaction of users of the Spanish library system.
The collections and holdings of newspapers often span several decades, and it is not rare to find continuous runs of publications exceeding half a century. Description comprehensive, page-by-page classification has been performed of newspapers that have been in the circulation for 20, 30 or 40 consecutive years, detailing the events that have occurred and that can be viewed in the digitalised material. This gives the users accurate information about the data being searched for, and they will not be left wondering if they did not find the information they were looking for because it did not appear in certain issues of a newspaper or whether this was because these particular issues of a newspaper did not form part of the collection.
With a project of these characteristics, the Subdirectorate General of Library Coordination and the Autonomous Regions collaborating in the project have taken a great step forward in Spain’s participation in the digital libraries project sponsored by the European Union in its VII Framework Programme, as they have complied with all the technical requirements of the project. Its volume is also significant when comparisons are made with other European or even global projects with similar characteristics.
ALTO and other new functionalities
In August 2009, the Library of Congress, through the Network Development and the MARC Standards Office, decided to adopt ALTO as the standard, and it created an editorial committee with the participation of libraries that are promoting the largest digitisation projects in the world: CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH, British Library, National Library of Finland, University of Kentucky, Library of Congress, Schlukbier Consultants, OCLC and Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Most importantly, it will be interwoven with a broad set of standards, both North American (through NISO) and international (through ISO and IFLA). From this point of view, one highlight is the possibility of using METS (Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard), through an extension, to transmit the characters presented and organised according to ALTO as metadata.
On the one hand, ALTO allows maintaining the facsimile format of the digital press and, on the other, it indicates the coordinates of each and every character recognised on a page, which makes it possible to index and later search the entire text.
The ability to exchange digital information between different libraries using METS has proved to be extraordinarily useful in the case of the Virtual Library of Bibliographic Heritage, where these metadata are regularly used.
It is also notable that various bibliographic reference managers can be used, such as Zotero, to download descriptions and links to pages thanks to the implementation of COinS, a metadata structure that transmits information and bibliographic references through a family of styles of bibliographic citations, which will certainly facilitate use by researchers, specialists and readers of all types of the large amount of information already included in the Virtual Library of Historical Press in this version 6.0 of the programme that manages it.
The Virtual Library of Historical Press contained a total of 5 million pages on 25 March 2010, the date when Hispana was presented, through which contributions will be made to the great Europeana project. It also has new functionalities, which are described in brief, such as the new tools for the web 2.0 or for updating data structures to the new MARC 21/RDA cataloguing standard.
It also includes a new image viewer, which makes it possible to consult images such as those obtained when digitising large format newspapers in their original size.
