Digitized newspapers and digital research: What is the library‘s role?

Mass-digitised newspapers offer researchers, academic and non-academic, a readily-accessible and invaluable resource for all sorts of historical enquiries. Research of print-medium newspapers, even as reproduced as microfiche or similar formats, traditionally entails the relatively close reading of individual articles, in order to extrapolate the information pertinent to the research question pursued. The re-medialisation of historical print newspapers into digital format, however, opens up new analytical avenues that allow the methodologically-savvy researcher to extrapolate information across a large number of texts with the help of approaches developed for text mining and information retrieval. The question for which this paper will present possible answers is: how can libraries that hold digitised newspaper collections support these distant reading-approaches? In answering that question, the paper will focus on three interlinked areas with potential roles for libraries and present best practice examples. These areas are (1) technical infrastructure, (2) methodological knowhow and (3) analytical tools: 1. Most research libraries have accepted their key role in providing a digital research infrastructure and are increasingly engaged in actively developing the constituent parts of said infrastructure. Researchers applying distant reading approaches, which ideally need open access to the entire data set in order to apply its approaches rather than curated interfaces, are still not part of the main vision. 2. Few historians are trained in text mining, information retrieval and related approaches. It will be argued that libraries have not only a responsibility to give access to research-relevant digital data but also to provide competent consultation and teaching in analytical methods suitable to and made possible by the digital medium. 3. The final area encompasses the provision of tools that implement standard methods on the newspaper corpora. This area might be one where libraries focus on the re-use of already existing tools rather than own developments