Metadata and data structures for the historical newspaper digital library

We examine metadata and data-structure issues for the Historical Newspaper Digital Library. This project proposes to digitize and then do OCR and linguisting processing on several years worth of historical newspapers. Newspapers are very complex information objects so developing a rich description of their content is challenging. In addition to frameworks for the logical structure and physical layout, we propose metadata relevant to the image processing and to the historians who will use this collection. Finally, we consider how the metadata infrastructure might be managed as it evolves with improved text processing capabilities and how an infrastructure might be developed to support a community of users.