The Great Digitization Project

The objective of the project was to digitize all the Danish Society newsletters/magazines and make them available on our website for everybody to share.

The first regular news publication (foreningsblad) from the society, originally referred to as Den Danske Forening (DDF), was November - December 1959.

Fortunately the committee had the foresight to save a copy of each issue through to the present time. By 2005 the publications were starting to be produced by computer and the electronic files were saved so that digitization was no longer required from that time onward.

The digitization process required unpacking the boxes of newsletters many of which were already sorted by date and scanning each page on both sides to colour image files in high resolution. As there were many blemished and other marks that appeared on the scanned files, including print through from the other side of the page, it was necessary to photoshop every image to enhance the black, white and colour contrasts. Some aberrations were due to the paper having been folded, staple and hold punch marks. There were also problems with small type that blurred letters so that they weren’t recognizable. These had to be manually cleaned up on the image file.

Considering that the digital versions of the publications would be hosted on our website it was also important to make the resulting files as small as possible while retaining optical quality. So printed photos which were made up of thousands of tiny black dots, had to be worked on to obtain a compression which was much more efficient, producing the same quality image with a much smaller file size. When scanning, areas that appear to be a solid colour actually contain many slight variations which cause poor compression. These irregularities had to be fixed to make the areas a single solid colour as was particularly the case with the red banner headings.

After each page had been turned into a cleaned up image file it was saved as a Portable Document File (PDF). PDFs are considered the standard way to represent printed documents on a computer. Every computer has software to display PDF files the way the original documents were captured. However, just having an image inside a PDF doesn’t solve the requirement to be able to search for text inside the document. So the next step was to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert every character image to an actual searchable character from the alphabet. Our publications were in Danish for the most part until the mid 90s so the OCR process required a Danish dictionary to recognise Æ Ø and Å. The pages of each issue were assembled, the OCR process completed and finally, each newsletter issue was digitally optimized to reduce it’s file size again and finally uploaded to the society’s website. The site also includes all the News Magazines after 2005 which were already in PDF format.

A search function on the web page enables anyone interested to search for any word within any of the publications based on the information that Google/Bing, etc., have extracted as they periodically search and index our website. Search results vary depending on the completeness of the indexing over which we have no control. Hopefully with time it will get better.

The digitization project which I started in 2012 encompassed 46 years of publications with an average of 11 issues per year and comprising over 3000 pages scanned, processed and uploaded to the website.

Thanks must go to all the dedicated members or our club who put together the news magazine who have consequently saved a huge volume of history in the process and kept the members informed of the club activities. Contributors, editors, layout processing, printing, folding, mailing lable sticker-ons and many others, including Danish sources sending content. Where would we be without them.

Kurt Marquart

May 2024

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