02 November 2009

Forward Australia

Here's another example of innovation in newspaper digitization. From Australia's National Library, not only are they making text searchable newspapers available freely online at http://newspapers.nla.gov.au, they've also implemented a system so that anyone can correct the text. You don't even have to register if you don't want to, just correctly complete a captcha to gain entry to the editor.

As shown in the illustration, you can align the original alongside the automated translation and make corrections in the highlighted line.

2 comments:

Sandra said...

I wonder how many years it will be before Canadian newspapers are available in such an accessible way.
One small consolation is that I have found references to my English ancestors in a couple of English newspaper articles that had been copied to the Australian papers - a common practice I think in the early colonial days.

Anonymous said...

Google Books should try this.