Wow!
"Currently researchers, 30,000 a year, have to go to Colindale in north London to scan through microfilm or hard copies"
That's a lot of researchers!
The British Library and its commercial partner brightsolid - a division of DC Thomson - are to digitise 40 million pages of old newspapers. The library holds 52,000 national and international titles covering 300 years. Currently researchers, 30,000 a year, have to go to Colindale in north London to scan through microfilm or …
Lets hope the scans will be of high enough resolution / contrast to be actually readable, have lossless compression on the images and that the OCRing will be usefull/intelegent enough to index with differentiated titles.
Future generations will need to know who ate the hampster.
Gannett
I'm not clear on how this works. Will there be any requirement for them to censor possibly libelous comments that have been published in the past? Or for that matter, anything that falls foul of recent cartoon pornography legislation? Surely selling digitized pictures of the then-16-year-old Sam Fox on page 3 falls foul of distribution laws?
It's been a long time since I worked there, but I remember rumours of a reading room at Holborn where they held copies of all the magazines which had been published - including the porn, of course.
I understood you needed a pretty good reason to request access...
Interesting point though - it's a copyright library, so has to hold copies of everything published in the UK. Now the law has changed to make it illegal to view some of this stuff, presumably it can stay in the archive unseen but the moment anyone looks at it, it's an offense. Quantum-state Pornography, if you like. I guess the librarians have to wear blindfolds.
I was looking up something for my father, details of a story he half-remembered, and Google found the answer in a digitised copy of a newspaper from Melbourne.
The OCR was patchy, but the scan was quite readable by a human.
And I wouldn't want to bet on anything printed in the 20th century being out of copyright, unless I knew when the author had died.