State of impresso newspaper collection - April 2018

We provide an overview of the current collection. More details about technical aspects will follow in two upcoming blog posts on image format evaluation and data pre-processing.

Where are we ?

As of April 20218, our digitized newspaper collection is mainly composed of Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers in French and German. If the national libraries of Switzerland and Luxembourg as well as several other institutions agreed right from the project proposal to provide impresso with their newspaper archives, we were confronted in the last months with the need to approach Swiss cantonal libraries as well as private copyrights holders individually. Although not a straightforward process, we all in all succeeded in getting about 20 Swiss and 28 Luxembourgish newspapers so far, most of which are on our servers and being processed. During this phase we benefited from the institutional support of Liliane Regamey from the Swiss national library and from the technical assistance of RERO team, and we would like to address our warmest thanks to both of them.

Swiss newspapers

Our acquisition of swiss newspapers focused so far on the French speaking part of the Confederation (“Romandie”). In general newspaper digitization campaigns started during the second half of the 2000s and are still ongoing or planed. Such activities were coordinated by the national library, in collaboration with cantonal institutions and/or private publishers (La Liberté, Le Nouvelliste, la Société Neuchâteloise de Presse, Le Temps, etc.), often with the support of an association bringing together the main actors. The material to which we have access corresponds to image scans and OCR output, all produced by a private company. Here is the current list of impresso Swiss newspapers:

Le Temps and NZZ

Le Temps and Neue Zürcher Zeitung are among the major Swiss newspapers (for French and German-speaking parts of Switzerland, respectively) and both organizations accepted to support impresso. NZZ is the oldest newspaper in Switzerland, which has been published without interruption since 1780. Le Temps was born in 1998 (20th birthday this year), from the fusion of 2 existing newspapers: Le Journal de Genève published since 1826 and Le nouveau Quotidien since 1991, Le Journal de Genève having itself integrated La Gazette de Lausanne, published since 1804.

Luxembourgish newspapers

Dutch newspapers

Impresso also received the support from the National Library of the Netherlands, who accepted to share with us their newspaper archive in French language. Those newspapers will be processed from July 2018 on.

What’s next

We keep getting into contact with institutions at Swiss and European level and other collections will complement the current set, first on the list being Belgium and remaining Swiss newspapers.

Thanks

We are very grateful to all institutions who accepted to share their collections.