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At the British Newspaper Archive, we have started to digitize international newspapers from the British Library.  These rich titles explore the story of the British Commonwealth, from the time when the sun didn’t set on the British Empire through to states gaining their independence.   At times, the subject of the newspapers brings us face to face with the stark and sometimes inhuman reality of colonialism and the legacy of the British Empire across the world.Below we will explore some…

One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool.  This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive.  OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text.   The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text.  However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement.  As a group, we…