Digitisation of newspapers

Newspaper digitisation project 2014-17

Thanks to an administrative decree, 35 million newspaper pages divided into 181 titles were digitised between the years 2014-17 and made accessible through mediestream.dk. The basis for digitising were the numerous microfilms. 

The selection of newspapers to be digitised was based on several criteria:

• Current newspapers were given top priority
• Titles that were filmed in its entirety were given a higher priority than those that were not
• Even geographical coverage of the entire country  
• The entire political spectrum represented

We are, however, far from done with our older newspapers. Only half of these can be found in mediestream.dk. The rest are waiting to be digitised. In the coming years, we will digitise more newspapers to ensure that they are preserved and to increase their use via online access.

Digitisation - current matters

The basis for digitising, now and in the future, is direct scanning from the original newspapers. This means that we obtain colour, better rendering of images, clearer text and better character recognition. We look forward to making our work with these scans available.

To begin with, our focus has been on filling out blanks in mediestream.dk. The blanks are there because not all daily newspapers were microfilmed in their entirety. We have selected Ringkøbing Amts Dagblad from the year 1880 to 1975, Langelands Social-Demokrat 1947-64, as well as old volumes of Frederiksborg Amts Avis, Isefjordsposten, Jydske Tidende and Social-Demokratisk Ugeblad.

Subsequently, we want to scan a range of newspapers from the southern part of Jutland, focusing on the reunification year 1920. This is also a work in progress.