CDNLAO Newsletter
No. 65, July 2009
The National Library of Australia has made available a service that provides free online access to digital versions of Australian newspapers published between 1803 and 1954. The service is currently in beta phase but users can already search across 26 newspaper titles including The Sydney Gazette, The Brisbane Courier, and the Northern Territory Times. Currently over 360,000 newspaper pages and over 3.3 million individual articles are available, with more content to be added over the next three years.
The free-to-use service supports full text searching across every page of every newspaper in the service, including advertising, cartoons, birth, death and marriage notices, as well as the news articles. Users can browse the collection by state of publication, title and date or undertake keyword searching. They can then view the digital version of each article in the context of the entire page and newspaper issue. The service also provide a range of interactive features. For instance, users can tag and write comments about the article, and even correct the electronically generated text.
The National Library has also received a $1 million grant from the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation to digitise the Sydney Morning Herald. Digitisation of this title is underway and users can expect to see the first issues of the Sydney Morning Herald being made available in the service in the second half of 2009.
The Australian Newspapers service has been developed through the National Library's Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP). In collaboration with the state and territory libraries the Program will enable Australian out of copyright newspapers to be digitised and made accessible online.
To access the Australia Newspapers service go to:
http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home
For more information about the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP) go to:
Cathy Pilgrim
Director
Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program
National Library of Australia
CANBERRA ACT 2600
E-mail:cpilgrim@nla.gov.au
Phone: +61 2 6262 1514
Copyright (C) 2009 National Library of Australia
