In a few months' time a five-year project that enabled every issue of The Times and The Sunday Times, along with their predecessors, the Times of Malta Weekly, the Times of Malta and the Sunday Times of Malta, to be digitised, will be complete.
The project began in 1998 when the microfilms of these publications were obtained from the National Library of Malta. Not only had the entire library (including the photographic library) of the publication's publishers, Allied Newspapers Limited, gone up in smoke (literally) on Black Monday - October 15, 1979. According to Kurt Storace, who heads Allied Newspapers' Archiving Department, the newspapers published up to 1999 also had to be scanned.
"Up to then only the physical copies, volatile as they were, were kept," Mr Storace said. "Since then, pdf versions of each newspaper page as it was sent for printing have been archived."
By the middle of 2000 all the newspapers had been scanned and converted into high-resolution (400 dpi A3-sized Tif) images. Over 440 CDs were used to store every newspaper produced since 1930.
The next step was to convert those scanned images into searchable text. Mr Storace said the process involved four basic steps:
1) rotate each image, which consisted of two newspaper pages, 90° counter-clockwise so that the pages were the right way up;
2) separate the two-page spread to have two individual A3 pages;
3) identify different areas of text; and
4) store the text through a process of optical character recognition (OCR).
"A number of files are generated from each page," Mr Storace said. These include the page image and an XML file that makes the searching and highlighting of text easier.
The XML file, he explained, contains the OCRed text and the co-ordinates of every single OCRed word to enable it to be highlighted during the search process. This process is still ongoing.
"The bulk of this conversion process was undertaken last summer," Mr Storace recalled. Thanks to a team of part-timers working in shifts continuously from Monday to Sunday, the entire issues of The Sunday Times of Malta up to 1930, when it was the Times of Malta Weekly, and all the issues of the Times of Malta up to the beginning of 1946 have been OCRed.
The process of exporting XML files has reached the early 1950s, with all publications dating back to January, 1965, now available at archive.timesofmalta.com (alternatively, you can follow the link from the main Website, www.timesofmalta.com).
"There is a wealth of information waiting to be explored, apart from being a handy resource for anyone wishing to look up anything that could have appeared in our publications," according to Adrian Hillman, director of Allied Newspapers Ltd, who was responsible for overseeing the creation of the Archiving Department.
"We have now added the facility to enable the public to access this information through a convenient interface that will ensure maximum satisfaction and ease of use," he added.
When you access the Archive, you are given a user name and password of your choice. The search interface guides you through a search, and there is a handy preview facility so you can check the context of your search result.
Within the preview facility is the option to zoom in on the text. "You can zoom in without loss in quality because the pages have been scanned to such a high resolution," Mr Storace said. Once you have made sure you have found what you are looking for, you can download the page.
The file size is quite reasonable and can vary from 65K to 300K, depending on whether there are photographs in the page or text only (as in the Classified section of the newspaper).
Four simple packages have been devised to enable people to search the Archive:
¤ for Lm5 you can search for a maximum of 10 pages within a seven-day time window (so each page you download will cost 50c);
¤ for Lm20 you can search for a maximum of 50 pages within a 30-day time window (so each page costs 40c);
¤ for Lm105 you can search for a maximum of 300 pages within a six-month time window (so each page costs 35c); and
¤ for Lm180 you can search for a maximum of 600 pages within a 30-day time window (so each page costs 30c).
Mr Hillman said that, following the soft launch of the service in February, there had been a positive reaction, with many users saying they were impressed with the ease of use and quality of the service.
"Many expressed surprise on two levels: that searching an image-based archive could be so easy; and that our organisation, which is an institution, could come up with such an avant-garde archiving service," he said.