Bringing Historical Advertisements into Research Focus – Europeana Newspapers Project

Aleksandra Trtovac ; Nataša Dakić

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 25 (2014) no. 1.

Résumé

The Europeana Newspapers Project will offer users worldwide over 18 million digitized pages of newspapers, of which 10 million will be available in full text. The basic idea of the project is to provide, through the Europeana portal, an integrated approach to newspaper collections from various European countries. The University Library “Svetozar Marković” participates in the project with more than 40 newspaper titles and over 400,000 digitized pages issued in the period from 1850 to 1945, mostly printed in Cyrillic. As an added value to the project, librarians of the The University Library “Svetozar Marković” analytically processed over 2,000 component parts (ca. 500 advertisements) from old Serbian newspapers so that the component parts are searchable through corresponding metadata and annotations. The emphasis is placed on the processing of daily news, stories, poems, short news, announcements, advertisements, obituaries, public calls, photos, etc. This paper will analyze the contribution to the project especially in the light of open access to the full text of newspaper advertisements. The content of this type of component parts fully reflects the spirit of the past, indicates development of certain industries, but also covers all aspects of cultural and social life since advertisements contain invitations to important events, manifestations, ceremonies, book promotions, but also job offers, offers for various types of services, selling furniture, food, medicine, land and property. Text within advertisements provides excellent material for researchers in the area of cultural history and theory of marketing, especially from the aspect of the history of advertising and marketing. Before the appearance of radio and television newspapers played a key role in the development of advertising and marketing.