Newspapers

We use bespoke, high-resolution planetary scanners and a range of high-resolution cameras, offering non-contact capture of your delicate newspaper collections. Our equipment can capture single page or double-page spreads creating output formats in TIFF, JPEG (JPEG2000), PDF (PDFA) or any other industry-standard image format you may require. We can also create further surrogate files, such as OCR’d multi-page PDFs, MS Word and eBooks.

All files are captured by our highly trained digitisation technicians using overhead, daylight balanced, non-heat producing lighting, before undergoing a formal quality assurance checking procedure. The final step in the process is the delivery of your electronic files by hard drive.

As standard, TWA survey all material prior to any digitisation project being carried out to ensure that it can withstand the scanning process. If there is evidence of fragility, brittleness, torn pages, and/or mould, or any other signs of damage, then recommendations are made for how to repair and stabilise the content appropriately.

There are many things that need to be taken into consideration when costing your digitisation project, such as:

• Fragility
• Pre-existing damage
• Scale of the collection

Consequently, it’s impossible to give a definitive answer as to cost, but you can get a rough estimate using our digitisation quote calculator below.

Newspapers are a delicate material to begin with and unsuitable storage conditions, handling, and time only serves to make them more fragile, so care must be taken not to turn the pages too quickly. The pages must also be digitised on a flat surface and without heat producing lighting. If the content of the pages are not captured clearly then this will impact any plans you might have to carry out Optical Character Recognition (OCR) later down the line. Every single page needs to be turned by hand and newspaper collections often consist of many tens, hundreds, or sometimes even thousands, of individual issues, which means it is often a slow and lengthy material to process.