GIVE newspaper project Primeur

The GIVE newspaper project Primeur has been made possible thanks to support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and is part of the Flemish Government’s 'Resilience Recovery Plan' (links in Dutch).

Challenge

Meemoo exists to support and promote the use of digital archives. Our core task has always been to safeguard audiovisual heritage, but now we’re also taking steps – with the GIVE newspaper project, Primeur – to ensure paper heritage is preserved sustainably and made digitally accessible. We’ve already built up experience with newspaper digitisation in the News from the Great War, Abraham 2020 (link in Dutch) and New Tidings projects together with Flanders Heritage Library.

What makes Primeur so urgent?

A study by Flanders Heritage Library (link in Dutch) clearly highlighted the importance of large-scale newspaper digitisation: newspapers are among the most consulted digitised sources of heritage on existing heritage platforms. A broad public consisting of researchers, teachers, but also students and historians, make use of these source materials.

A combination of frequent consultation and the poor paper quality on which many publications have been printed in the past has put Flemish newspaper heritage under serious threat. The paper used for newspapers can also suffer from acidification, which makes it brittle and more susceptible to damage. Digitisation has therefore become an essential part of this picture, which is why we’ve set up a mass digitisation project with content from eight of our partners: we’ll be digitising more than 630,000 newspaper pages by the end of 2023.

Our role

Meemoo has a coordinating role in all GIVE projects. For Primeur, we’re doing this together with Flanders Heritage Library – each contributing from our own areas of expertise. With its experience in library heritage and newspaper digitisation, Flanders Heritage Library is taking care of the inventory phase and organising registrations, which includes all the physical handling of the fragile carriers, from selection to packaging.

In concrete terms, the division of roles is the following:

Flanders Heritage Library is responsible for:

• the selection of newspapers that are in scope for the project

• the planning, organising and follow-up of registration and packaging

• all that has to do with materiality. How to handle the newspaper? In which condition are they? What needs are there for loose or ripped pages?

We are responsible for:

• the selection of the digitisation partner through a tendering procedure

• setting up the registration system

• defining the technical specifications

• the follow-up of the digitisation

• the quality control of the files after digitisation

• the inflow of the digitised files in the meemoo archive system, where they will we sustainably preserved

Approach

We're working together with eight content partners in the Primeur project - digitising and providing access to 630.000 newspaper pages from:

• ADVN (Archive for National Movements)

• Amsab-ISG (Institute for Social History)

• Hasselt Limburg Library

• Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience

• KU Leuven Libraries

• KADOC Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society (from KU Leuven)

• Bruges Public Library

• Ghent University Library

The project is focusing on vulnerable newspapers in urgent need of digitisation. The newspaper digitisation followed a selection phase, after which all of the newspapers were carefully registered and packaged. The most suitable digitisation partner was selected in a tender procedure, being Picturae. In 2023 we'll start digitising, after an elaborate testing phase. Once the digitised newspapers have been quality controlled, they will be fed into the meemoo archive system where the digital copies will be stored sustainably.

What happens after digitisation and sustainable preservation?

The digitised newspapers will then be made accessible on meemoo’s interaction platforms and also on our content partners’ platforms if desired. We’re aiming for easy consultation of the newspapers and enabling searchability through the use of OCR (Optical Character Recognition – link in Dutch). The ultimate objective? A digital copy that matches the newspaper pages as closely as possible, to eventually replace the analogue original.

We’ll also be contributing further to other elements of this plan – in particular for Flemish heritage databases, supervising cultural organisations in their digital collection registration projects and the digital leap in education.

Partners