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An international partnership of the Royal Swedish Library, the American Swedish Institute, the Minnesota Historical Society and the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, ILL, is leading an effort to digitize some 600 Swedish-language newspapers that were published in the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The project not only will preserve a part of the immigrant story particularly significant to Minnesota, which became the most Swedish of the states, but it will also allow scholars, genealogists and descendants to easily access those newspapers for research in a translatable form.
The Minnesota Historical Society has been digitizing newspapers for nearly a decade. The Royal Swedish Library has digitized about two dozen Swedish-American newspapers. It has collected virtually everything printed in the Swedish language since 1661 and has original copies which are superior to microfilm in the digitizing process. The challenge is trying to find a way to make something written in Swedish usable for people in the US. Online translation tools vary in quality, and Swedish has three extra characters: ä, ö and å.
The project started in 2008 and is to be completed late in 2015.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
The project not only will preserve a part of the immigrant story particularly significant to Minnesota, which became the most Swedish of the states, but it will also allow scholars, genealogists and descendants to easily access those newspapers for research in a translatable form.
The Minnesota Historical Society has been digitizing newspapers for nearly a decade. The Royal Swedish Library has digitized about two dozen Swedish-American newspapers. It has collected virtually everything printed in the Swedish language since 1661 and has original copies which are superior to microfilm in the digitizing process. The challenge is trying to find a way to make something written in Swedish usable for people in the US. Online translation tools vary in quality, and Swedish has three extra characters: ä, ö and å.
The project started in 2008 and is to be completed late in 2015.
Minneapolis Star Tribune