Help us make history accessible to all!

In the depth of Archant's vaults sit hundreds of thousands of old newspapers covering over 150 years of local and world history. From the inception of the Eastern Weekly Press in 1845, the various Archant publications have covered everything meaningful, impactful, important and relevant that happened to our side of the world.

Unfortunately, these 150 years of stories chock full of valuable lessons are, for the most part, inaccessible to the public. The LocalRecall project aims to change that.

With the help of Google and local tech leaders ubisend, Archant is turning 150 years of history trapped in paper into a highly intelligent machine. We are making our history, your history, available by voice to one and all.

And we need your help.

FAQs

What is Local Recall?

Local Recall is a new and innovative Archant project, backed by Google. The aim of the project is to make the old, dormant paper archives currently tucked far away from the public eye accessible to everyone. Those archives are a goldmine of information; we want the community to have full access to it, in the easiest way possible.

How can I help?

The process briefly described above is not perfect. Machines do things pretty well, but sometimes nothing beats the human eye. Some of the digitised papers come back to us (and ubisend) with errors the machines could not pick up on.

This is where you come in.

We need volunteers like you to help us fix these errors and make the content perfect. While we do our best to get there and have people helping us, the help of the community will be invaluable in achieving our ambitious goal.

We recently scanned 15,175 pages of various local journals (EDP and Norwich Mercury, mostly). Out of the 15,175, we extracted close to 300,000 unique articles. Most of them came out great, but we need the help of you, our community archivists, to make the rest perfect.

Are you interested in history? Do you have some time to help out on this project? If so, we would love to have you on board! Fill out the form on the left and we will be in touch.

What do I need to be able to help?

You don't need much to contribute to the project:

  • Access to a computer (Mac or Windows PC, laptop or desktop)
  • Basic computer knowledge
  • Access to the internet
  • An interest for local and world history!

Got all that? Fantastic! Fill out the form on the lefthand side of the page and we will be in touch.

Need more information?

Take a look through our FAQs PDF.