O acesso aos jornais históricos: considerações sobre o desenvolvimento de coleções digitalizadas

A utilização de recursos eletrónicos no desenvolvimento de processos de inves-tigação que envolvam a recolha de dados a partir de jornais históricos tem-se de-senvolvido de uma forma crescente, sendo de realçar a digitalização dos jornais. O conhecimento das necessidades informacionais dos investigadores e a utilização de um abrangente conjunto de funcionalidades técnicas contribuem para o melho-ramento da conceção de bases de dados de jornais digitalizados e das suas formas de pesquisa. O presente artigo pretende explorar algumas questões determinantes no desenvolvimento e utilização de coleções digitalizadas de jornais históricos, ou seja, abordar aspetos fundamentais como os que se relacionam com as práticas de pesquisa e utilização das coleções, as limitações técnicas decorrentes da digitali-zação e, ainda, as funcionalidades das interfaces do utilizador e as modalidades de pesquisa que as bases de dados podem oferecer.The use of electronic resources for developing research processes involving the collection of data from historical newspapers has been increasingly developed. In this context, the digitisation of newspapers is of particular relevance. Knowledge of researchers' information needs and the use of a comprehensive set of technical fea-tures contribute to improving the design of digitised newspaper databases and their search options. This paper aims to explore some key issues in the development and use of digitised collections of historical newspapers, in other words, it addresses fun-damental aspects such as those related to the search practices and use of the collec-tions, technical limitations arising from digitisation, functionalities of user interfaces, and also search modalities that databases can exhibi

Historical Newspaper User Interfaces: A Review

After decades of large-scale digitization, many historical newspaper collections are just one click away via online portals developed and supported by various public or private stakeholders. Initially offering access to full text search and facsimiles visualization only, historic newspaper user interfaces are increasingly integrating advanced exploration features based on the application of text mining tools to digitized sources. As gateways to enriched material, such interfaces are however not neutral and play a fundamental role in how users perceive historical sources, understand potential biases of upstream processes and benefit from the opportunities of datafication. What features can be found in current interfaces, and to what degree do interfaces adopt novel technologies? This paper presents a survey of interfaces for digitized historical newspapers with the aim of mapping the current state of the art and identifying recent trends with regard to content presentation, enrichment and user interaction. We devised 6 interface assessment criteria and reviewed twenty-four interfaces based on ca. 140 predefined features

Mining User Queries with Information Extraction Methods and Linked Data

Purpose: Advanced usage of web analytics tools allows to capture the content of user queries. Despite their relevant nature, the manual analysis of large volumes of user queries is problematic. The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of named entity recognition in digital library user queries. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents a large-scale case study conducted at the Royal Library of Belgium in its online historical newspapers platform BelgicaPress. The object of the study is a data set of 83,854 queries resulting from 29,812 visits over a 12-month period. By making use of information extraction methods, knowledge bases (KBs) and various authority files, this paper presents the possibilities and limits to identify what percentage of end users are looking for person and place names. Findings: Based on a quantitative assessment, the method can successfully identify the majority of person and place names from user queries. Due to the specific character of user queries and the nature of the KBs used, a limited amount of queries remained too ambiguous to be treated in an automated manner. Originality/value: This paper demonstrates in an empirical manner how user queries can be extracted from a web analytics tool and how named entities can then be mapped with KBs and authority files, in order to facilitate automated analysis of their content. Methods and tools used are generalisable and can be reused by other collection holders.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe