News of the World

A stack of bundled newspapers from a defunct bookstore in Cairo. Dailies from Republican-era China. Imperial Russian broadsheets dating as far back as 1782. More than 1,000 independent and revolutionary newspapers from 19th-century Mexico.

These are a few of the multilingual, globe-spanning media resources that Bryan Benilous has digitized through the East View Global Press Archive. The project is a collaboration between Stanford Libraries, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and East View Information Services, where Benilous is director of newspaper products. It aims to make 25 million pages of newspapers available online by 2026.

Benilous led the development of the new platform, sourcing and scanning materials from more than 200 partner libraries, archives, and publishers. “This is truly global, with source material coming from practically every continent,” he says.

Optical character recognition (OCR) makes texts fully searchable and cross-searchable in academic databases. “OCR is not perfect, and our platform permits users to correct the text,” Benilous says.

In the past five years, they’ve put more than 1,200 full-text newspapers in dozens of languages online. Many titles are open access, providing global users free access for the first time to these fantastic caches of historical content.

“We have digitized millions of pages a year and are on track for our biggest year yet, with 2.5 million pages scheduled for release in 2021,” Benilous says. As for the 2026 target: Exceed that goal of 25 million pages with open-access content to make research more equitable, bringing a variety of viewpoints into digital resources.