An integrated system for creating a Digital Library from Newspaper Archives

Newspapers are considered to be the first draft of history, while at the same time, are part of a country’s cultural heritage. By converting newspaper archives to digital resources we achieve digital preservation in terms of preventing paper deterioration as well as providing full utilization of the archives by all interested parties. In this paper, we present a series of applications pertaining to the retro-conversion of newspapers, i.e. the conversion of newspaper pages into digital resources, as well as to the transformation of the printed material to an accessible digital archive. These applications constitute an integrated system that provides solutions to problems related to digitization, verification and quality control of newspaper images, manual and automatic article clipping, and, finally, information retrieval in intranet and internet environment.