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Liberating the Printed Form: The Singapore NLBs Experience Ms Ngian
Lek Choh Director, National Library
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Singapore Modern history: From 1819 Population: 4.8 million Land
area: 710.2 sq km Official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin,
Tamil Newspapers in print: 17 from 2 main publishers Current and
historical Singapore newspapers : over 130
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Outline
Printed newspapers constraints Digitisation means to transform
NewspaperSG digital resource, more than just digitised
newspapers
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Newspapers Printed Format Access newspaper archives through
microfilms Over 17,000 microfilms reels on some 200 Singapore and
Malaya titles Limitations to access Impossible to search Research
process : time-consuming, tedious Began exploring newspaper
digitisation in mid- 2000s
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 5 Why
Newspapers? Newspaper : running commentary of nationhood Intent :
start with key Singapore newspapers where there was a clear need
from users The Straits Times : most read local newspaper, history
of 165 years, an ideal choice Permission sought from its publisher,
the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH)
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Breakthrough: First Agreement (2007) Jul 2007 : NLB signed
agreement with SPH to digitise The Straits Times from 1845, and
make it accessible via librarys multimedia stations Agreement
includes born digital deposits of The Straits Times from Jan
2007
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Breakthrough: Second Agreement (2009-2010) Second agreement signed
: digitise all other SPH newspapers (including vernacular language
papers) and magazines. Agreement also sought for permission for
remote access to digitised content Also, NLB and MediaCorp Press
signed an agreement to digitise TODAY / Weekend TODAY and provide
access to the content
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Digitization the Transformation Retain newspaper layout Identify
and tag individual articles Classify different types of articles,
eg advertisements Apply OCR for full text search
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Newspaper
as Digital Resource Innovations
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Innovation #1 Desired outcome Newspaper content available at users
search space GYM, yet not exposing full text content Innovation Put
the brief information such as article title, date, page no., and a
50-word extract of article to the internet. Table of Contents (TOC)
of each issue fully searchable
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore GYM
Search results from NewspaperSG
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Learning Point To manage risk : Proof-of-Concept used Test
possibility of generating first 50-words of each article in TOC
format to submit to Google for crawling and indexing High
percentage of access from search engines (Dec 2009) Search Engines:
60.1% Direct/Bookmark: 37.2% NLB Websites: 7%
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Innovation #2 Desired outcome Ensure that IP of articles is
protected - access rights for offsite and onsite users, by
newspaper title and period; to tag and filter 3 rd party news
content Innovation Combine the use of IP address range, date of
publication, watermarking, meta-tagging to implement digital rights
management; acceptable to publisher. Very cost effective
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Access Rights Management (IP address and date of publication)
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Remote
Access Rights Management (Watermarking)
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Point Identifying 3 rd party content Newspaper articles and
photographs where the publishers do not own rights Need to filter
these article from remote access Added a field to indicate the
source of the article Time taken to re-ingest and re-index all
articles affected the development timeline
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Innovation #3 Desired outcome Newspaper as digital resource for
personal use and research, any time anywhere, keeping within IP
protection Innovation A feature to save and email URLs of articles
user can keep URL in his Facebook account or iGoogle
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Saved
Citations page
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Citations
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Sharing
an article link
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Posted to
profile
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Innovation #4 Desired outcome Read each newspaper edition as is
online, with convenience of searching, browsing, locating and
zooming Innovation New enhanced interface; reduced browser pop-up
by having one integrated page with multiple services; highlights
(search term), page zoom and article zoning
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore User can
click the search results and TOC on the same page without the need
to toggle between browsers
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Innovation #5 Desired outcome Rich digital resource on our
nationhood with over 10 million articles of different types, yet
easy to find Innovation Open source search engine with full text
search capability, classifying articles as they are digitised
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Search
results from NewspaperSG
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Article
Page
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Full-page
view Browse page by page
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Value of
Service (usage)
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All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Accolades
Its an amazing resource. Singaporean blogger This is great news for
us! It certainly saves the tears and the backache from sitting
through hours' of scrolling through microfilms in the icy-cold
rooms at the library. Kudos to the library's digitalization
efforts! Member of singaporeheritage Yahoo! Groups With the new
National Library Straits Times search engine, doing research like
this has just been completely revolutionised! Member of
singaporeheritage Yahoo! Groups I am very excited that the Straits
Times digitised newspapers are now online. I have found some
matches for my ancestors and their vessels who sailed to Singapore
in the mid-19th century User in the United States Am so glad that
NLB has put together this service! Library patron
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Challenges OCR and digitisation of language newpapers : Chinese and
Tamil newspapers With many copyrighted newspapers ready for
digitisation, NLB needs to prioritise and project manage
Integration of service delivery for born-digitals and digitised
newspapers
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You! [email protected]