A group of Nigerians is seeking volunteers to help create a digital archive of 18,627 days of newspapers – one newspaper for each day from 1 January 1960 to 31 December 2010.
The aim of the tracking archvi.ng project is to create an open-source for the public, researchers and journalists to approach contemporary issues with more context and stronger evidence, according to its founder and online journalist Fu’ad Lawan.
Mr Lawan said the lack of such an archive means that very little could be found about Nigeria’s past via Google search while a lot of information is rotting away in underfunded public libraries.
He added that the archive will not only help journalists and scholars but can also aid filmmakers to produce authentic historical movies by providing them with the pulse of the times.
However, he said the project is facing three major hurdles; accessing the newspapers, scanning the newspapers, and making the digital images searchable online.
Mr Lawan said the project has secured access to the National Archives of Nigeria but they still need to convince newspaper companies to grant them the intellectual property rights to enable open access to the digital archive.
The second challenge according to Mr Lawan is how to scan frayed newspapers that have bound into quarterly volumes.
“The perfect printer is the overhead type, where you’d just need to place the casebound newspapers on a surface and flip the pages. We found one printer that’s efficient enough to scan an entire newspaper in less than 10 minutes. Since it’s a large format scanner, the price also appears to be, well, large format.” He stated.
The third challenge is making the digital newspapers searchable via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.
“Newspapers tend to have tricky layouts – images, cartoons, article boundaries, ads – and it’s going to require some advanced skills to separate what is being OCR’d.” He explained.
Mr Lawan said all these require a lot of work and a huge amount of money.
To help make the vision a reality you can choose to donate or volunteer via https://airtable.com/shrrfwFap1Gf088m1.
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