Monday January 26, 2009
Council employees must wear singlets
The National Library of Australia, with State and Territory libraries, is digitising out of copyright newspapers from across the country. The titles and dates are listed here. As of 24 January 2009 there are 367,651 pages consisting of 3,304,825 articles available to search.
See what comes up when you look for ‘Mosman’.
After last week’s hot spell, this one – from The Canberra Times, 1938 – seemed appropriate to blog.
COUNCIL EMPLOYEES MUST WEAR SINGLETS
SYDNEY, Friday.Following complaints that employees of the Mosman Council had been working without any covering on the upper part of their bodies, the council engineer (Mr. Dee) to-day ordered that they must at least wear a singlet.
Simple to use, the site is also very powerful. As you’d expect you can search and browse all text and view the paper as it was printed, but you can also copy, tag and comment on articles, save them as an image or PDF, or print just the relevant piece.
The mechanical process of digitisation by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) means that the digitised text is not always correct. The National Library has given users of the site the power to correct these errors. As we’ve seen with projects like Wikipedia and the video speech matching by users of TheyWorkForYou.com, there’s real value in giving the community access to the project – whether they aspire to the text-correctors hall of fame or make just a single edit to a piece they’ve found. It all counts.
See what you can find at Australian Newspapers beta – Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954
Bernard D, Internet Coordinator, at Information Online #io2009
