628 483 Newspaper Pages Available On-Line

The digitalization of all Issues of SN since 1861 is officially complete. Archives are available at www.shn.ch by Zeno Geisseler Since its first edition in the year of 1861, the Schaffhauser News have been archived -In the publishers house of course, but also in urban, state and national libraries and archives. However, theres a large downside to these files: They are not easy to search. Someone who only wants to read a newspaper from the first to the last page, does not have any problems. However, someone looking for a specific Keyword will encounter difficulties. Already ten years ago we thought about digitalizing the contents and making them available online. In February of 2008, we started the Project SN Digital, yesterday Thursday, five years later, it has been officially brought to an end. Close Collaboration Representatives of the National Library, of city and State Archives, of companies involved and the SN-Publisher Meier + Cie met in the business hall of the Schaffhauser News, to toast to a successful Project completion. One cannot understand the future, when one does not know about the past, said the SN Chief editor and publisher Norbert Neininger. It is nice that the SN was supported by the digitalization of archives as one of the smallest independent newspapers out there. City, State and Federal Government had made financial contributions to the work and made expertsknow-how available. Marie Christine Doffey, director of the national library, said that in the Romandie another 14 Titles were digitalized this way. Now the SN is the first ever newspaper in German-speaking Switzerland that has gone online. Other newspapers like the NZZ, had their archives digitalized as well but this was in comparison to the SN-Project not done in cooperation with the National library. Milestone accomplished The archiving questions can be reduced to accessibility questions, determined the Canton state archivist Roland E. Hofer. The SN have entered new territory and accomplished a milestone. However the next challenge is here: The information should also be made available long and short term. Rene Wagner, who managed the Project for Meier + Cie, said that they started completely from scratch. First of all we did not know how many newspaper pages our archive would take. An apprentice went inside the archive end of December 2006, armed with a scale, measuring tape and calipers to estimate the number of pages. He came up with 612053. Later this number came out to be very accurate, at the end there were 628483 pages that were digitalized (see box for more facts and figures).

Holes in pages The digital acquisition of the newspaper pages has technically been a major challenge, said Michael Thuleweit, managing director of the company Datamatics Global Services. The quality of the paper made the scanning not go as easy all the time , he said. Sometimes the pages were stuck together, or the pages had holes in them. Not only were editorial pages digitalized, but advertisements and ads as well, which was a big challenge because of all the different fonts that were used. Really difficult to read was Gothic script, said Thuleweit, but as well as Text or Pictures that took up more than one newspaper page, which of course the computer cannot recognize. According to Wagner the project manager, 99 percent of the fractured pages were digitalized correctly, later pages were brought up to 99,9 percent. Fake Geneva and Lustkrieg If you look at the archives, you can actually still find some errors here and there. Lake Geneva became Fake Geneva and an article about bird conservationists bears the original Title To shoot the Virds. Often the software interpreted the Gothic lettered -tz as Eszett and the V as a B. In reports out of the era of the Second World War it talks about air offensibe and air bar. Of course it is still possible to read these articles. Knowing about the possible difficulties in advance, about the Gothic letter s and f almost being the same, makes it possible to accordingly customize the search. The Swiss general Guisan can also be found as Guifan. These errors are now gradually eliminated, Wagner said, the responsible parties will gladly receive hints of errors. (archive@shn.ch). Spelling transformation However, it is not always the Computers fault if a passage is not found: In more than 150 years since the first SN-Edition, the spelling has transformed: lithographirt was changed to lithographiert and is now lithografiert; Nationalrath to Nationalrat, Schiffahrt to Schifffahrt. Sometimes simply the names of the given institutions have changed. So the Groe Rath became Grossen Rat and was then named Kantonsrat. The Schaffhauser News archive is available to all subscribers free, at archiv.shn.ch. Both, the Texts as well as newspaper pages themselves can be viewed. Anyone who is not subscribed can acquire temporary online access.

SN Digital Facts and Figures 628,483 newspaper pages have been scanned in about 190 000 working hours. This corresponds to the inventory from 1861 to April 2003. The later editions were already available in digital form. 163 515 pages were printed in the now hard to read Gothic style - 42 employees of Datamatics cared only about providing these Gothic style pages. The pages include 1.875 million articles and 434,057 images. Another 374,158 pages have been scanned which was a particular challenge due to many different fonts. The entire data record is about 6 terabytes large, equivalent to about 750 DVDs. Each new edition of SN comes automatically to the archive, it is growing steadily.