Abstract
Many libraries offer free access to digitised historical newspapers via user interfaces. After an initial period of search and filter options as the only features, the availability of more advanced tools and the desire for more options among users has ushered in a period of interface development. However, this raises a number of open questions and challenges. For example, how can we provide interfaces for different user groups? What tools should be available on interfaces and how can we avoid too much complexity? What tools are helpful and how can we improve usability? This paper will not provide definite answers to these questions, but it gives an insight into the difficulties, challenges and risks of using interfaces to investigate historical newspapers. More importantly, it provides ideas and recommendations for the improvement of user interfaces and digital tools.
Highlights
Interfaces for digitised, historical newspapers offer great opportunities for many different user groups, such as academic researchers, lay historians, students, teachers, etc
We argue that integrating tools for analysis and visualisation of data and metadata would address the needs of various user groups, but that libraries could profit from expanding their digital interfaces
II SURVEY ON DIGITAL NEWSPAPER USAGE As a part of the wider effort to examine the interest in, and use of, digitised newspaper collections across Europe, as well as to find out how the general public interacts with them, the NewsEye DH team together with the national libraries of Austria, Finland and France conducted user surveys on the different online interfaces offered by the libraries
Summary
Interfaces for digitised, historical newspapers offer great opportunities for many different user groups, such as academic researchers, lay historians, students, teachers, etc. Interfaces steer what users can learn from digitised newspapers, and they influence workflows by offering functions and tools [cf Jarlbrink and Snickars 2017]. We argue that integrating tools for analysis and visualisation of data and metadata would address the needs of various user groups, but that libraries could profit from expanding their digital interfaces. In order to be able to make such assertions, a DH team made up of researchers from Austria, Finland and France in the EU-funded research project ‘NewsEye: A Digital Investigator for Historical Newspapers’ experimented extensively with existing newspaper search interfaces of the three national libraries using specific humanities case studies. The interfaces used were ANNO (ONB – Austrian National Library), Digi (National Library of Finland) and Korp
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