Digitising community newspapers

We recommend utilising the National Library of Australia (NLA) co-contributor model rather than independent scanning/digitisation. NLA has prepared contributor guidelines to assist communities, councils and other associations who want to fund the digitisation of their local newspapers.

Preferred procedure

NLA’s preferred procedure is for NLA to undertake the scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing on behalf of the contributing organisations.
Have funds transferred to NLA to cover the costs of the work (approximately $2 per page).
The scanning is done from master microfilm rather than from original copies of the newspapers.
SLQ is always happy to release master microfilm to NLA for digitisation for Trove (assuming SLQ has the masters!).
NLA normally only digitises up to 1954 due to copyright limitations.
Should you wish to digitise up to 1963 you would need permission from the copyright holder.
The digitised content is available at article level in NLA’s Trove.

Average costs with NLA Co-Contributor Model

To give you a rough idea of costs, we normally base our calculations on an average of about 1000 pages per roll at $2 per page (or $2000 per roll).
The quality of the microfilm can have a major impact on the quality of the digitised product.
The earlier the microfilm was created, the less rigorous the standards were applied. We would need to have a look at the film to ensure that the quality of the film met today’s minimum standards for digitisation.
Major issues we need to look for include filming done from bound volumes – may have distortion and totally illegible text in the gutters.
Checking the quality of the film does take a fair bit of time for our microfilm unit, so notice and scheduling is required.
Please let us know if you are likely to follow up on the digitisation proposal and we will be happy to check the film for you.

Tips

Start with a small run with NLA.
Use the results to garner support in your community.
Engage volunteers to participate in Trove’s Text Correction to fix local information.
Ask NLA for stats to build up support in your community for the NLA co-contributor model.

Fact sheet 6: Digitising community newspapers [PDF 84kb]