Digital newspaper database systems in India and the possiblity to apply the softwares of their systems to Japanese local digital newspaper databases and the roles of public libraries in Japan in developing digital local newspaper databases.

Japanese national newspapers like Asahi, Yomiuri, and Nikkei have built a full-text database and provide online newspaper digital archives, but for Japanese local newspapers, digital archive databasese are not progressing. Local newspapers are in a difficult financial situation, it is difficult to generate the cost of constructing digital archives, and there are few needs for databases, therefore the standard system for digitizing local newspapers has hardly been studied in Japan. For example, little research has been done on how to add metadata or to extract text data from a digitized files of original data such as PDF. In promoting digitalization, it is expected that it will be difficult for each company to develop its own business in the future, and public support is required, but it has not been decided where and how the entity should do it. In addition, newspaper companies that have been forced to discontinue paper publication in recent years, and how to preserve the original papers and materials has become a major issue. Therefore, I would like to pay attention to the role of the public libraries. This is because public libraries in each prefecture have played a major role in collecting and disclosing local information, such as building collections of local materials. Local newspapers have a long history since the Meiji era, and have actively taken up information on the region. If the libraries build a digital archive in collaboration with each local newspaper in the future, there is great potential to utilize the information in the local newspaper as regional information. In fact, Gifu Shimbun opens digitized past newspapers through the Gifu Prefectural Library system.

In India, which is a multilingual and multiethnic country, and unique multilingual newspapers are published in each region, and low-cost newspaper digital archives are being constructed using open source softwares like Greenstone or Dspace. In this presentation, I will introduce the case of digital newspaper databaksesystems India, examine the applicability of the system to local Japanese newspaper digital archives, and consider the main issues in constructing digital local newspaper archives in Japan.