I recently came across a company named Olive Software. I thought that the software they have developed was very useful if a library was trying to digitize holding of newspapers and magazines. The company offers many different software suites, but probably the most useful to libraries and archives would be the ActivePaper Archive software. Olive software has been specifically developed to allow for the easy transfer of newspapers and magazines to a digital format that can be easily searched and cataloged. This software is pretty amazing; it is designed to read columns off of the page while scanning. If the original print has been damaged or smudged Olive can even interpret what had been printed. The software is able to transfer electronic, paper, and even micro-form documents into an XML format that can be used in digital collections. Once an article has been found users are able to view it as either a simple text representation or as an actual capture of the original article.
The software also attaches descriptive information for each object as it is scanning the documents. This includes things like the name of the paper, the title of the article, the date of the issue, the section the article appeared in, and the byline of the author. All of this information is displayed in the search result record after a search. The software includes both simple and advanced keyword search features. As well as a really slick browsing function that allows users to see an entire newspaper page and highlight each article to select it. It really is very close to actually reading a paper copy.
I have visited a number of collections that are using this software. Two of the most notable are the Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection and the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection. Both of these collections use the basic Olive software design and are really quite fun to browse through especially if you are looking for local or state history for those states.
