Europeana Newspapers: searching digitized historical newspapers from 23 European countries

Europeana Newspapers is a European Commission-funded project which is refining, aggregating and giving researchers online access to historical newspaper content from 23 European libraries. It also offers free, open source tools which individual libraries can use to assess refinement quality and metadata standards in relation to their own digital newspaper collections. The content made available by the project is available both through Europeana and a dedicated newspaper browser. Europeana is a way to see the newspapers in the context of over 30 million other items of cultural heritage, while the dedicated browser hosted on The European Library site gives researchers the possibility to refine their search terms (e.g. by date, publishing country, issue) and to search the full text of many newspapers. So far, the browser, which has been online for approximately one year, has proven popular with researchers, and further improvements to its functionality are planned in 2015. This could include the ability for users to tag articles or to edit, and help correct, the full text of individual articles.