ITR/IM: Digitizing the Burney Collection of Early English Newspapers

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The Center for Bibliographical Studies at the University of California, Riverside, is in the process of digitizing the Burney Collection of eighteenth-century English newspapers at the British Library. Access is currently possible only through a single microfilm copy in the reading room, because of the fragility of the originals. Use of even a digitized version could remain cumbersome and time-consuming because of the large size of the collection, 650,000 pages, and access limited by date and title. Heretofore the vagaries of handset type, uneven lines, broken letters, smudged or changing ink intensities and yellowing paper, it has not been possible produce an accurate, searchable text through available optical character reading software. The emergence of new technologies now enables the Center to produce a searchable text with a high degree of accuracy. A fully searchable text linked to digital images will permit extraordinary access and unlock for researchers the incredibly rich range of data the Collection contains. The result will provide a new model for accessing both periodicals and monographs of the hand-press era. It will open up whole new research strategies and topics. And it will extend the wonders of computer-based text searching to the corpus of texts that form the foundation of the modern world.