Christmas comes early for Papers Past users

If you build it they will come

On September 10, 2007 the National Library re-launched one of its most popular websites, Papers Past. Over 250,000 pages were OCRed (optical character recognition) and made full-text searchable. The user interface was completely overhauled.

In the year since the re-launch, Papers Past has been visited over 1.8 million times by more than 500,000 visitors, generating 31 million page views. The content has also grown and in the first year featured 1.2 million newspaper papers from all around the country, generating around 7.5 million searchable articles and covering years 1839 to 1920. Wow! That’s a lot of papers with a lot of articles for a lot of years viewed by a lot of people a lot of times.

One highlight of the past year’s efforts has been the release of the Grey River Argus, a significant source of early labour history and the first newspapers on the site to cover the entire First World War. The Grey River Argus was a rarity amongst New Zealand newspapers in that it was open about its political affiliations.

Perfect stocking stuffers: new functionality and new searchable content

The latest release of Papers Past is a double treat, with new functionality and new searchable content.

In direct response to user feedback, new navigation features have been added for search results allowing users to select the number of results display per page and navigate directly to specific pages of results. This new functionality will make dealing with large sets of search results easier to navigate.

Changes have also been made to the newspaper issue pages so that long contents listings can be displayed by page, and the layout of the OCR page view has been improved.

In collaboration with the Google News Archive, newspapers in Papers Past now have increased exposure to both the News Archive and the general Google search engine.

The following titles have been OCRed and added to the searchable content:

· Poverty Bay Herald
· Bay of Plenty Times
· New Zealand Illustrated Magazine
· The Observer
· Marlborough Express
· Timaru Herald

The addition of these new titles brings the total number of searchable newspaper issues to 135,000, comprising over 800,000 newspaper pages and just over 9 million articles, captions and advertisements!

The future’s so bright

In the coming year work will be done to make the remaining 86,824 newspaper issues (comprising 371,175 pages) in Papers Past searchable as well as adding a further 100,000 newspaper pages from the following publication runs:

· Ashburton Guardian 1887-1889, 1896, 1898, 1910, 1921
· Ellesmere Guardian 1891-1899, 1904-1906
· NZ Truth 1906-1930
· Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle 1905-1930
· Oxford Observer and Canterbury Democrat 1889-1901
· Victoria Times 1841.