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The material is already digitized and now undergoes technical treatment so it can be made available. This week will be made public the full contents of the editions of 1827 and 1890 decades.
The period covered in this phase involves the fabulous amount of 85,000 scanned pages, which constitutes an invaluable material for researchers of the Empire period, especially of slavery in Brazil.
The effort begins with the digitization of microfilm at appropriate scanners, operated by professionals always attentive to the quality of the captured images so that they can later be viewed by users in BNDigital.
The following step is the technical treatment: all resulting images undergo a process which includes optical character recognition and words indexing. The result is that internet users may use BNDigital to search for key words in all the textual content.
According to Vinicius Pontes Martins, coordinator of Network of the Brazilian Virtual Memory (coordenador da Rede da Memória Virtual Brasileira), "we are processing Jornal do Commercio's editions from 1913 through 2014, which were sent already in digital format by Diários Associados, our partner in this endeavor, and will be made available over the coming months ". The period between 1900 and 1913 imposes an additional challenge because of the quality of the microfilm: "We are analyzing the feasibility of capturing this period from the original, which ends up being a much longer process."