Remarkable archive acclaimed in Japan and abroad
Yomidas Rekishikan, the Yomiuri Shimbun’s innovative online archive of articles, has been awarded three prestigious prizes by newspaper associations in Japan and globally (including an award received by the original CD-ROM archive that preceded the online version). No other online news archive has received as many distinguished awards.
Special prize from global news association
Yomidas Rekishikan receives a special prize at the First Annual Asian Digital Media Awards
Yomidas Rekishikan’s outstanding features were honored with a special prize at the first Asian Digital Media Awards in November 2010, organized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Thomas Jacob, chief operating officer of the association’s Asia Pacific Team, offered unstinting praise of Yomidas Rekishikan, saying it “uses outstanding methods to provide articles from the past in digital form.”
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers is the world’s largest association of newspaper companies, with about 3,000 member companies in more than 120 countries.
Technical prize from Japan newspaper association
Yomidas Rekishikan received the Technical Committee Prize in 2010 from The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association, reflecting the groundbreaking features that enabled users of Yomidas Rekishikan to easily search and view stories from the archive of 11 million articles (as of 2009). The association said Yomidas Rekishikan deserved recognition for making it possible to print images of full newspaper pages while protecting The Yomiuri Shimbun’s intellectual property.
CD-ROM edition earns top Japan newspaper prize
Yomidas Rekishikan began as a project to create an archive of Meiji-era issues of The Yomiuri Shimbun. Work began in the autumn of 1994 as part of the events marking The Yomiuri Shimbun’s 125th anniversary. Beginning from the newspaper’s first issue from 1874, the project team scanned and catalogued every article of the 69,000 pages, writing headlines for articles which originally had none. The result was that each article of the digitized archives could be searched systematically and comprehensively. When completed, “The Yomiuri Shimbun of the Meiji Era” comprised 38 CD-ROMs of newspaper articles, with an additional CD-ROM containing the index.
In July 2001, the 13 jury members unanimously selected this CD-ROM archive for the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association Award, saying the set was “excellent not only for allowing ease in searching for articles, but also for demonstrating the historical and cultural values that newspapers possess.”