So far digital editions of Aftenposten, Dagbladet, Morgenbladet, Social-Demokraten (became Arbeiderbladet, now Dagsavisen) and Adresseavisen have been unveiled.
Aftenposten is covered from 1870-1900 (except 1871) and 1905, while "Trondhjems Adresseavisen" is viewable from 1767-1905. Dagbladet and Social-Demokraten are currently only available for 1905. To use the service your Internet browser must be able to use and approve the Java application which accesses the database.
"We are now making newspapers older than about 100 years available," said Geir Gisnås at the National Library's division in Rana. Newer editions are still covered by copyright considerations and cannot be made accessible without the consent of the newspapers.
The painstaking project manages to digitalize about 300,000 pages per year. So far only a fraction of the articles are searchable by text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techniques.
The main challenge to better OCR access is the gothic typefaces popular in the 1800's and this means Aftenposten still must be searched manually.
The microfilming has been done from fragile originals of the newspapers, which means quality varies, but most are legible.
Despite the current limitations, this valuable resource allows patient researchers access to a gold mine of information for tracking down everything from historical events to news about distant relatives.
