A Newspaper/Periodical Digitization Project in Mongolia: Creating a Digital Archive of Rare Mongolian Publications

A Newspaper/Periodical Digitization Project in Mongolia: Creating a Digital Archive of Rare Mongolian Publications

Curation

This journal article describes a two-year digitization endeavor implemented to digitally publicize and preserve limited amounts of endangered Mongolian newspapers and periodicals into a collection by the Press Institute of Mongolia, expanding its accessibility through the Internet. These scarce samples of newspapers document all manner of records ranging from economic to political alterations within Mongolian society after the fall of communism in the 1990s. The digitization process for newspaper items poses a great number of challenges primary because of the complexity of page layout, a print of poor quality, and a sizeable format. The archive utilized Greenstone for its creation, an open-source digital library software program set, which offers multilingual support in the development and preservation of such rare Mongolian publications. Supported by a grant from the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, the project focused on overcoming the challenge of properly preserving these records, while at the same time trying to build an effective search function that would work in the Mongolian language and display characters in the Cyrillic alphabet. This article explains the background of the project, its goals of providing access for the public and preservation to these long-lost materials, its decision process in digital imaging and the assemblage of the collection itself.

Matusiak, Krystyna K. and Munkhmandakh, Myagmar

The Serials Librarian, Taylor & Francis Online

2009-07-09

Taveras, Sabrina

Journal Article

ISSN: 0361-526X (Print) 1541-1095 (Online)

Krystyna K. Matusiak & Myagmar Munkhmandakh. "A Newspaper/Periodical Digitization Project in Mongolia: Creating a Digital Archive of Rare Mongolian Publications." The Serials Librarian, July 09 2009. 57:1-2, 118-127, doi: 10.1080/03615260802669136.