143 years of historic French newspaper to be digitised

Thursday 15 July 2021

The Société Jersiaise has begun a project to digitise every edition of the island’s historic French-language newspaper by the end of 2022.

Chronique de Jersey was the island’s last French-language newspaper, running from 1814 to 1957 - Société currently holds the only complete collection in the world in their Lord Coutanche Library.

They are working with UK-based company, TownsWeb, which specialises in digitisation of heritage collections, to create high-resolution copies of every published edition.

Pictured: Société holds the only complete collection of the newspaper in the world.

They will also OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the issues, meaning that people can search through the content using keywords, and also is an opportunity for non-French speakers to use automated translation applications.

The copies will be made available online via a new website, with the earliest issues online from July 2022, and the project due to be completed by December 2022. 

The £60,000 project is supported by the Jersey Community Foundation, which has given a grant of £31,000 towards it.

Pictured: The Société are aiming to have the project completed by December 2022.

On the collection’s significance, the Société explained: “Knowledge of our heritage brings great value to users in many ways, not least in relation to their personal and community history. 

"The public can use the collection to research family members’ personal and business activities and the history of the local organisations with which they are associated. They can also learn about the evolution of societal and political values on the island.  

“Through reading the accounts of debates, petitions and riots that took place as they were shaped."