Do jornal à ciência: a hemeroteca digital brasileira como fonte de informação para a pesquisa científica

Abstract

Digital newspaper libraries have been created by National Libraries for the past 15 years from the digitization of old newspapers and magazines. The initiative promotes the preservation of collections and the access through the “Web” anytime from anywhere. Information, the object of study of Information Science and the main element of Journalism, becomes more accessible as more and more journals are scanned by different National Libraries. This study aimed to analyze the features of digital newspaper libraries created by National Libraries, presenting the state of the art of these collections. From the research themes of graduate students of Health History searches were carried out in the Brazilian Digital Newspaper Library of Brazilian National Library, which made possible to evaluate the newspaper library as a source of scientific information. The offer of online newspapers and magazines by National Libraries facilitated the use of news as an important element in scientific research, or as the base of a research, or still as an insight. From the examination of thirteen digital national newspaper libraries, it was observed that each one adopts its own criteria for selection of material to be scanned and to disseminate, but the information representation has traditional foundations in Knowledge Organization. The major innovation detected was the adoption of optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search and retrieve information in the publications content.