Veridian Hits 110 Million Online Historical Newspaper Pages

Background

Veridian Software is the product and service provided by DL Consulting, a company that resides in Hamilton, New Zealand. They specialize in national newspaper collections worldwide, large statewide collections in the United States, and universities.

I interviewed the CEO of DL Consulting in July 2021. You can read it HERE. It will provide you with some background about Veridian Software.

Their website is VeridianSoftware.com.

They also were the providers of Elephind, which provided a federated search of many of their databases, all at once. It has currently been taken down, but who knows? It might be resurrected in the future.

Features

Some of the unique features of their software are the ability to handle different alphabets, such as Hebrew for the National Library of Israel, and the Japanese alphabet for the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection of primarily Japanese American newspapers. This collection is provided by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Another unique feature is the ability, via crowdsourcing, for registered users to make corrections to the text that resulted from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. Since digitized newspaper research is primarily dependent on the quality of the original newsprint, which is often over 140 years old, the ability for users to positively contribute to the newspaper index is a useful feature.

Projects

Currently, they have 74 installations of their software. They have provided solutions for the National Libraries in Switzerland, Estonia, Israel, Singapore, and New Zealand. They also have statewide collections in New York, California, Michigan, Colorado, Wyoming, Indiana, Virginia, Illinois, and Washington State. Over 30 universities are currently using Veridian software as well.

The company has recently reached a big milestone. They now have over 110 million pages in all their collections.

Below is a list of all the institutions (with links) using Veridian Software:

Check out the details about all of their projects HERE

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