Among the many valuable outcomes of the project – more than 20 million historic newspaper pages are now accessible via Europeana, and close to 12 million pages are fully searchable in The European Library, thanks to the large-scale refinement work undertaken during the project. There are already a number of great examples of how this vast corpus can be utilised in research, or in the development of new services and applications. Nevertheless, with a collection of this size, the majority of the content still needs to be explored and there are certainly many treasures buried within that yet remain to be discovered.
Europeana Newspapers has not only created a massive resource of easily accessible historical news, but also produced several handy tools for the exploitation and enrichement of digital newspapers, together with standards and best practices for collection holders that are aiming to provide their historical newspaper assets in similar ways.
Together, all these resources have pushed the state-of-the-art of newspaper digitisation and presentation in Europe.
As an exciting new development, a dedicated Europeana Newspaper channel will be launched in 2016! A new look and feel, more scalable servers, and possibly even more newspaper content are already in the pipeline. Make sure you follow the developments and be amongst the first to hear about them here.
Meanwhile, the project has summarised its main results in a restyled special issue of the Europeana Newspapers Final Report.