Your Vote for Historic Newspaper Data from the Austrian National Library

Winning the award 🏆

We are delighted that the European project NewsEye: A Digital Investigator for Historical Newspapers has won this year’s European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award in the Research category! The prestigious award recognizes outstanding projects in various fields every year. This year there were a total of 206 qualified applications from 38 European countries. The award ceremony will take place on October 7 in Bucharest, Romania. We are delighted for the team and happy about the successful collaboration!

But now you have the opportunity to make your opinion known and cast your vote:

Vote for the Public Choice Award! 🗳️

If you like the project, the NewsEye platform and the “Annolyzer” (for more info see below) then please vote for it at the Public Choice Award of the European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award.

How does it work?

Until 22nd of September 2024 you can cast your vote for your favorite projects of this year on vote.europanostra.org.

• Step 1 – Please select exactly three projects that you like. The first project chosen will receive three points, the second two points and the last one one point. Please note that you must vote for projects from different countries.
• Step 2 – You must then confirm your choice in an e-mail you will receive (please also check your spam folder to be on the safe side).
• Please note – If you do not vote for exactly three projects and if you do not click on the confirmation link, your vote will unfortunately not be registered.

Background 📚

The NewsEye project was funded by the European Horizon 2020 funding program and a cooperation between several European universities (La Rochelle, Helsinki, Innsbruck, Rostock, Paul-Valéry Montpellier, Vienna) and National Libraries (Austrian National Library, Finnish National Library, French National Library). The aim was to develop tools and methods during the project period from May 2018 to January 2022 that would improve access to historical newspapers (1850–1950) for researchers, library users and the interested public and thus change the way European digital cultural heritage is researched, used and analyzed. The heterogeneity and enormous size of the data set produced, with more than 15 million pages, was a major challenge. However, the project team was able to develop several tools that made it possible to achieve the key objective, such as automatic tools for text recognition, newspaper structure analysis and multilingual content processing. The “NewsEye Platform” tool was implemented in the ONB Labs under the title “Annolyzer”. This allows four newspapers from the Austrian National Library’s holdings and the data extracted from them (article segmentation, text contained, recognized proper names) to be searched dynamically. More information about the project can be found here, the “Annolyzer” can be found here. Have fun exploring!