10 Billion Words: The British Library British Newspapers 1800-1900 Project Some guidelines for large-scale newspaper digitisation.

The British Library (BL) decided that comprehensive chronological coverage across the whole of the nineteenth century was the key to their project, and as the holder of the 'master collection', the real challenge would be to convert a large volume of text into a searchable online resource knowing that "very little is out there in terms of "mass of content". The lessons learnt half way through the 'British Newspapers 1800 -1900' (BN) project argue that in order to digitise a large volume of historic newspapers to the highest possible quality, it is necessary to take the planning time to know the characteristics of your source material and to adequately resource your team from the outset. Existing agreed standards for digitisation from microfilm are defined but not fully followed. The BL therefore set about to establish some standards for filming for large-scale newspaper digitisation and guidelines for best practice. Problems with both the source material and the digitisation process prompted certain decisions. These decisions included: • Setting aside very poor condition volumes. • Condition survey/assessment of source material to act as a benchmark. • Refilming as a platform for digitisation, filming one page per frame to ensure a consistent look. • Only digitising from microfilm for speed, consistency and cost. • Human intervention to aid condition checks, page by page collation and simplified article zoning. • Open source software solution that can be repurposed Other points that have been considered in depth are the design of an interface for access to newspapers, how much metadata should be incorporated, and what kind of searches should be enabled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]