All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Liberating the Printed Form: The Singapore NLB’s Experience Ms Ngian Lek Choh Director, National Library

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 2 Singapore Modern history: From 1819 Population: 4.8 million Land area: sq km Official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil Newspapers in print: 17 from 2 main publishers Current and historical Singapore newspapers : over 130

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Outline Printed newspapers – constraints Digitisation – means to transform NewspaperSG – digital resource, more than just digitised newspapers

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 4 Newspapers – Printed Format Access newspaper archives through microfilms Over 17,000 microfilms reels on some 200 Singapore and Malaya titles Limitations to access Impossible to search Research process : time-consuming, tedious Began exploring newspaper digitisation in mid- 2000s

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 5 Why Newspapers? Newspaper : running commentary of nationhood Intent : start with key Singapore newspapers where there was a clear need from users The Straits Times : most read local newspaper, history of 165 years, an ideal choice Permission sought from its publisher, the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH)

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 6 Breakthrough: First Agreement (2007) Jul 2007 : NLB signed agreement with SPH to digitise The Straits Times from 1845, and make it accessible via library’s multimedia stations Agreement includes born digital deposits of The Straits Times from Jan 2007

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 7 Breakthrough: Second Agreement ( ) Second agreement signed : digitise all other SPH newspapers (including vernacular language papers) and magazines. Agreement also sought for permission for remote access to digitised content Also, NLB and MediaCorp Press signed an agreement to digitise TODAY / Weekend TODAY and provide access to the content

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 8 Digitization – the Transformation Retain newspaper layout Identify and tag individual articles Classify different types of articles, eg advertisements Apply OCR for full text search

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Newspaper as Digital Resource – Innovations

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Innovation #1 Desired outcome Newspaper content available at users’ search space – GYM, yet not exposing full text content Innovation Put the brief information such as article title, date, page no., and a 50-word extract of article to the internet. Table of Contents (TOC) of each issue fully searchable

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore GYM Search results from NewspaperSG

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore

Learning Point To manage risk : Proof-of-Concept used Test possibility of generating first 50-words of each article in TOC format to submit to Google for crawling and indexing High percentage of access from search engines (Dec 2009) Search Engines: 60.1% Direct/Bookmark: 37.2% NLB Websites: 7%

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Innovation #2 Desired outcome Ensure that IP of articles is protected - access rights for offsite and onsite users, by newspaper title and period; to tag and filter 3 rd party news content Innovation Combine the use of IP address range, date of publication, watermarking, meta-tagging to implement digital rights management; acceptable to publisher. Very cost effective

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Remote Access Rights Management (IP address and date of publication)

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Remote Access Rights Management (Watermarking)

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Learning Point Identifying 3 rd party content Newspaper articles and photographs where the publishers do not own rights Need to filter these article from remote access Added a field to indicate the source of the article Time taken to re-ingest and re-index all articles affected the development timeline

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Innovation #3 Desired outcome Newspaper as digital resource for personal use and research, any time anywhere, keeping within IP protection Innovation A feature to save and URLs of articles… user can keep URL in his Facebook account or iGoogle

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Saved Citations page

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Citations

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Sharing an article link

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Posted to profile

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Innovation #4 Desired outcome Read each newspaper edition as is online, with convenience of searching, browsing, locating and zooming Innovation New enhanced interface; reduced browser pop-up by having one integrated page with multiple services; highlights (search term), page zoom and article zoning

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore User can click the search results and TOC on the same page without the need to toggle between browsers

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore

Innovation #5 Desired outcome Rich digital resource on our nationhood with over 10 million articles of different types, yet easy to find Innovation Open source search engine with full text search capability, classifying articles as they are digitised

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Search results from NewspaperSG

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Article Page

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Full-page view Browse page by page

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Value of Service (usage)

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Accolades “It’s an amazing resource.” – Singaporean blogger “This is great news for us! It certainly saves the tears and the backache from sitting through hours' of scrolling through microfilms in the icy-cold rooms at the library. Kudos to the library's digitalization efforts!” – Member of singaporeheritage Yahoo! Groups “With the new National Library Straits Times search engine, doing research like this has just been completely revolutionised!” – Member of singaporeheritage Yahoo! Groups “I am very excited that the Straits Times digitised newspapers are now online. I have found some matches for my ancestors and their vessels who sailed to Singapore in the mid-19th century…” – User in the United States “Am so glad that NLB has put together this service!” – Library patron

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore 32 Challenges OCR and digitisation of language newpapers : Chinese and Tamil newspapers With many copyrighted newspapers ready for digitisation, NLB needs to prioritise and project manage Integration of service delivery for born-digitals and digitised newspapers

All rights reserved. National Library Board Singapore Thank You!