A success story - Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program

This article gives an overview of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP) (http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/) and the resulting free online public service – Australian Newspapers (http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home). The service was released to users by the National Library of Australia in August 2008 and has now been in operation for over a year. As at the end of October 2009, the Program has achieved free online public access to over 720,000 newspaper pages containing over 6.8 million articles. The public have helped to enhance the data by correcting over 6 million lines of text and adding 166,000 tags and 4200 comments. The Program is collaborative with every State and Territory Library in Australia being involved. The service supports the key objectives of the Australian Newspaper Plan (ANPlan) (http://www.nla.gov.au/anplan/) to enable communities to explore their rich newspaper heritage. By mid 2011 the Program will have digitised and made available 4 million Australian newspaper pages dating from 1803-1954