Welsh Journals Online Digitisation
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Welsh Journals Online is the most challenging digitisation project ever undertaken by the National Library of Wales. It aimed to create a website giving free searchable and browsable access to the contents of back-numbers of the major journals relating to Wales or the Welsh language. These journals form the core of the Library’s collection of printed books and are its most-used resource.
Executive Summary
Welsh Journals online collection - English
Welsh Journals online collection - Welsh
The journals were chosen to represent the diversity of material available, and cover English- and Welsh-language titles including scholarly articles on topics from archaeology to zoology, poetry, fiction, reviews and obituaries. The project publishes 400,000 pages of text, from 52 titles; the 180,000 pages of Welsh content represents the single largest corpus of text in the language available on the web. Some of the titles are well-known and widely used as sources (eg Archaeologia Cambrensis), while others have been overlooked or are difficult to access (Yr Arloeswr).
The digitisation of the material required intensive work on cataloguing, scanning, and OCR conversion in order to create a resource that can be easily explored and used with a range of technologies, including text readers and mobile phones. Although the OCR text was intended mainly to allow word-searching with highlighting, it has also been exposed to users who may wish to use it. It is hoped that images, texts, or pdfs from the articles become widely used as exemplars and source material in VLEs, websites, presentations and reports, exploiting the generous licensing terms on which the material is made available.
The resource has been actively promoted to the HE sector’s teaching and library staff, since they will be critical in directing students and researchers towards it. A series of roadshows to HE bodies throughout Wales was supplemented by mailings to universities elsewhere teaching Welsh or Welsh Studies, and presentations at conferences.
The website is fully exposed to Google and it is likely that many new users will find the resource through general searching of the web. For those who are unfamiliar with the journal literature of Wales some contextual help is provided in the form of factsheets; lesson plans based upon these have also been created to assists teachers wishing to use the Welsh Journals Online website to discuss the questions of copyright, searching, or referencing.
The majority of the material is covered by copyright, and licensing and rights management formed a significant part of the project. The need to control display at page level (so that where necessary a single article or photograph could be blanked) required detailed metadata to record permission, gathered in cooperation with the publishers. Of the titles included, the proportion of blanked pages is very low (less than 0.1%), but rights issues led to the exclusion of some titles completely. The Library did not offer any payment for permission and works by Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, and R S Thomas are therefore not shown. Given that the cost-per-page of web publication is approximately £2, the payment of even minimal fees would transform the economics of mass-digitisation.
The digitisation of the journals is the first step towards the Library’s long-term vision of mounting on the web its entire print holdings relating to Wales and the Welsh people1, and it will be maintained and added to in the future.