Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age: "Search All About It!"

In recent years, cultural institutions and commercial providers have extensively digitized newspaper collections, and while this mass newspaper digitization has exponentially increased their availability, in 2012 it was reported that just 17% of newspapers in European libraries had been digitized.

The unique form and materiality of newspapers, and their grounding in a particular time and place, provide challenges for researchers and digital resource creators alike This book asks the timely question: what can the large-scale digitization of newspapers tell us about the wider cultural phenomenon of mass digitization?

The author presents an overview of the theoretical debate around mass digitization, relating it to the particular challenges of historic newspapers.

Drawing on evidence from case studies he moves beyond theory to look at how user studies can inform the debate, thus expanding upon existing work to provide a bridge between the theory and practice of information behaviour in digitized collections.