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No. 65, July 2009

The newspaper collection at the National Library Singapore consists of some 200 Singapore and Malaya titles dating back to 1806. It is an important resource that chronicles the political and social life of Singapore since the country's founding in 1819. The newspaper titles are mainly in English which is the language of administration in Singapore, and also in Malay, Mandarin and Tamil, the languages of the main ethnic groups in Singapore. This collection is a popular resource with students and researchers, and is primarily accessible through the 17,000 microfilms housed at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library in the National Library Building. In addition to its existing subscriptions of electronic databases like Factiva, Newsbank and Library PressDisplay, the National Library also began offering searchable archived local news content through its newspaper digitisation project in 2009.

Newspaper Digitisation Project

While electronic databases provide some access to local archival news content, the content is largely confined to newspaper issues published in the 1980s and thereafter. This means that a large portion of Singapore's historical newspapers still resides on microfilm. Browsing through microfilms can be both a tedious and consuming process based on users' experiences. To enable archival news content to be searched and viewed from multiple locations, the National Library Singapore embarked on its newspaper digitisation project in 2007, beginning with the longest-running English language newspaper in Singapore, The Straits Times. This initiative was made possible through a landmark agreement, with the newspaper's publisher, the Singapore Press Holdings, which allowed the National Library to digitise and make available The Straits Times, from its earliest issue published in 1845, through the National Library Board (NLB)'s National Library and island-wide network of Public Libraries for individual research and reference purposes.

The service, named NewspaperSG, was released on the Web through a soft launch in March 2009. Both onsite and offsite users can now search over 548,000 pages of the digitised Straits Times (1845 - 1982) and the microfilm holdings of over 200 Singapore and Malaya newspapers from a single website at http://newspapers.nl.sg. Users will also be able to obtain some brief information such as the article title, date of publication, and a 50-words extract from the search results. Full article views are, however, only available through the library's multimedia stations (PC stations). To aid the discovery of archival news content from the Web, a "Table of Contents" is also generated for each newspaper issue and then submitted to major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) for indexing.

NewspaperSG Website

The National Library is currently in its second phase of newspaper digitisation. This covers The Straits Times (1983-2006) and other English language historical Singapore newspapers. The National Library also hopes to extend its scope of digitisation to include the vernacular newspapers as well.

Positive Responses From Users

Both established researchers and emerging scholars under the Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship, who have used the website during the pre-launch trial and after its launch, have found the service beneficial to their research, not only in terms of the time saved, but also for the unexpected finds yielded from their searches. Some of this information have been or will be presented in papers and books. The library is also much encouraged by comments from netizens who found the website "an amazing resource" and that "with the new National Library Straits Times search engine, doing research like this has just been completely revolutionised!" An unexpected development was the increase in enquiries from users in Malaysia, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands and the United States. Most of these enquirers stumbled upon the service from our Google-indexed pages that carried information on their family ancestry. A month after its release, the website recorded an encouraging figure of 3,799 visitors and 40,108 page views in April.

Legal Deposit

Legal deposit and microfilming are the National Library's main strategies for preserving Singapore's newspapers. In 1955, the National Library assumed the responsibilities for materials deposited under the Printers and Publishers Ordinance. This legal obligation carries on till today through the NLB Act 1995. All publishers are required to deposit two copies of all print materials with the National Library, and these include newspapers as well. In 2007, the National Library began accepting digital deposits of The Straits Times as part of the agreement with the Singapore Press Holdings. This digital copy will later be made accessible together with the rest of the digitised Straits Times. The National Library is also receiving digital deposits of two other local newspapers, MyPaper and Today from February and November 2007 respectively.

Microfilming and Preservation

In the National Library's early history, binding was the available preservation tool for newspapers. By the 1950s, sections of the early newspapers were in a bad state of decay, mainly due to the poor quality of paper used in newspaper printing. Age, climate and insect damage were also contributing factors to it. To address this issue, a large part of the collection was microfilmed. Within the National Library, a unit was set up to film newspapers and other materials such as rare books and government publications. Local newspapers continue to be microfilmed today though this work is now outsourced to external vendors.

Of the two copies of newspapers received through legal deposit, one copy is kept in its original state and housed in acid-free boxes under controlled conditions. They are stored offsite and are retrievable, if required. The second copy is sent for microfilming where one master negative and one direct duplicate are made and kept under controlled conditions. From the direct duplicate, positive copies are reproduced for the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library and the three Regional Libraries in Singapore. The library also provides reprographic services where patrons can purchase positive copies of the microfilms, and photo prints on plain and photographic papers.