Paul Gooding

In recent years, cultural institutions and commercial providers have created extensive digitised newspaper collections. This book asks the timely question: what can the large-scale digitisation of newspapers tell us about the wider cultural phenomenon of mass digitisation? The unique form and materiality of newspapers, and their grounding in a particular time and place, provide challenges for researchers and digital resource creators alike. At the same time, the wider context in which digitisation of cultural heritage occurs shapes the impact of digital resources in ways which fall short of the grand ambitions of the wider theoretical discourse. Drawing on case studies from leading digitised newspaper collections, the book aims to provide a bridge between the theory and practice of how these digitised collections are being used. Beginning with an exploration of the hyperbolic nature of technological discourses, the author explores how web interfaces, funding models and the realities of contemporary user behaviour contrast with the hyperbolic discourse surrounding mass digitisation. This book will be of particular interest to those who want to investigate how user studies can inform our understanding of technological phenomena, including digital resource creators, information professionals, students and researchers in universities, libraries, museums and archives.

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Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age

Melissa Terras

Legal deposit libraries, the national and academic institutions who systematically preserve our written cultural record, have recently been mandated with expanding their collection practices to include digitised and born-digital materials. The regulations that govern electronic legal deposit often also prescribe how these materials can be accessed. Although a growing international activity, there has been little consideration of the impact of e-legal deposit on the 21st Century library, or on its present or future users. This edited collection is a timely opportunity to bring together international authorities who are placed to explore the social, institutional and user impacts of e-legal deposit. It uniquely provides a thorough overview of this worldwide issue at an important juncture in the history of library collections in our changing information landscape, drawing on evidence gathered from real-world case studies produced in collaboration with leading libraries, researchers and practitioners (Biblioteca Nacional de México, Bodleian Libraries, British Library, National Archives of Zimbabwe, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Sweden). Chapters consider the viewpoint of a variety of stakeholders, including library users, researchers, and publishers, and provide overviews of the complex digital preservation and access issues that surround e-legal deposit materials, such as web archives and interactive media. The book will be essential reading for practitioners and researchers in national and research libraries, those developing digital library infrastructures, and potential users of these collections, but also those interested in the long-term implications of how our digital collections are conceived, regulated and used. Electronic legal deposit is shaping our digital library collections, but also their future use, and this volume provides a rigorous account of its implementation and impact.

Paul Gooding

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