Uppsala University has assembled a collection of press material that is unique in Sweden and invaluable for research in the social sciences. It consists primarily of editorials, comprising 3-4 million clippings from 50 Swedish daily newspapers from the period 1945-2000. It is of great importance that these unique sources of contemporary history are preserved. If the material is stored electronically, the press archive will be both simpler and more efficient to use for future information researchers. All of the Press Archive's clippings are currently being scanned and registered. In tandem with this basic project, work is now getting under way to develop a database to create a fully searchable press archive.
In order to test and evaluate the consequences and potential of an , a pilot study is now being carried out with the aim of creating a model to serve as a prototype of the system to be used when the system is scaled up to full production and operation. The objective is to create a system to enable full-text searches of a comprehensive body of material. Experience from this project can be made available to other similar newspaper archives. The pilot study comprises the development of: a model search system, OCR software that can deal with varying paper quality, fonts and layouts, and an organizational scheme to optimize the conversion of scanned material to text format.