The Beta service was under development for a few months and was made publicly available in July 2008. It now contains 360.000 pages (3.5 million articles) and is being very well used. There are about 28,000 searches per day (not including browsing newspapers page by page). We are actively gathering feedback from the public on the service so that we can continue to develop it to meet their needs. Screenshots follow to illustrate how the service can be used.
This is the homepage for the service. It allows users to search articles using a keywords or browse across newspaper titles, dates, or by state. The pane on the right is a ‘on this day’ feature, that also gives users a taste of what they may find within the service.
This is a search results page – so in this example a user has searched on angus mcdonald. The search results list the articles that contain the term Angus MacDonald. At this stage the user can view one of the articles by clicking on it, or they can refine their search further using the groups on the left hand side. The search can be refined by newspaper title, or article category, or only retrieve illustrated articles.
This is the page view showing the entire newspaper page. All the articles on the page are listed on the left. The entire issue can be browsed by using the page button at the top.
This next screen is the article view – so the user has selected a particular article to look at. Users can zoom in or out and choose to view the article in the context of the entire page. They can also navigate to any other page within the newspaper issue. The electronically generated text created through the OCR process is displayed on the left hand side. Also this is where we have added some really great interactive functionality to engage with the user community. Users can tag the article with keywords and they can write comments and notes about the article. We are building personalisation into the service so that if users login they will be able to choose to make their tags and comments public or private. So they can share their comments with all users or they can add their own private research notes that only they can access. One feature that we believe is innovative and not available in any other online newspaper service, is the ability for the user to correct the electronically generated text. There are a number of reason why the electronically created text is not always 100% accurate including the quality of the original newspaper that the image was created from. By clicking on the Help fix this text button
Users are presented with a screen that allows them to fix the errors. The public have been very active in making text corrections. Any text that is corrected will also benefit the service by improving the quality of the data that can be searched by others.
Text correction is proving to be an addictive activity for some members of the public who are correcting thousands of lines per month. From July – October 2008 750,000 lines of text have been corrected.
Users can also tag articles with keywords.
Adding tags has been a popular activity for users. From July – October 2008 14,000 tags have been added.
Users may add comments. This has not been taken up as much as we thought it may have been so far.
On this screen users can find out more information about the newspaper title and browse by date.
Titles are being grouped by state and alphabetically on this screen for users who want to browse.
I would like to invite you to use the Beta service and send us your feedback.
That brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for allowing me to talk to you about this exciting Program and I would be very happy to answer any questions.