As part of the Europeana Newspapers project, The European Library has developed a historic newspapers browser that enables users to perform full-text searches in millions of historic newspaper pages. "For the first time in history we have the opportunity to do transnational comparative research on the basis of big data!" says Toine Pieters, digital humanities researcher from the University of Utrecht. The prototype interface has undergone usability testing in Spring 2014. On the basis of the recommendations received, The European Library simplified the search page and made it possible to browse the content by date, newspaper title and geographic map. Before the end of the project, a further usability study will be carried out to test the improvements made. While the amount of content in the browser continues to grow rapidly, one can already explore 1.8 million historic newspaper issues and perform full-text searches across 7 million pages. By the end of January 2015, the browser will contain around 30 million newspaper pages from 25 libraries in 23 European countries. Users will be able to search: 1. full text of more than 10 million historic newspaper pages; 2. named entity recognition in Dutch, German and French to enable searches of names of people and geographic places; and 3. metadata records of over 20 million historic newspaper pages.
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