Digiteeritud Eesti ajalehed uurimisallikana
Digitised Estonian Newspapers as a Research Source

Summary/Abstract: Large quantities of printed heritage have been digitized in Estonia allowing computer assisted research in digital history. By official estimates, at least 42% of Estonian cultural heritage has been digitized, including 30% of printed heritage. In this article, I approach three interrelated questions on the state of the archives: 1) What do the digital newspaper archives contain and how representative are they of the historical media publishing? 2) How could we use this material in research and what opportunities does it present? 3) What could we pay attention to in developing the state of the art further? I address these questions by collecting data from several archives, building tools to assist research, and situating the current state in the context of general developments in digital archives. For a general overview, I collected data from four different digital archives that contain newspapers (Digar, Etera, UT DSpace, Kivike). Altogether more than 700 000 newspaper volumes have been digitized and made available. I created visual overviews to see their distribution in time, along with their access rights (90% are openly accessible). Estimating year to year representativeness based on bibliographic data, I find that as much as 59% of the relevant newspapers’ issues printed could be already digitized.

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