National Library of Estonia to Introduce Digitized Newspaper Portal

I have written about the National Library of Estonia (Eesti Rahvusraamatukogu) previously. The latest news is that the Library is opening a digital newspaper portal. Here is a quote from the press release:

The National Library of Estonia launched DIGAR Estonian Newspapers portal (dea.digar.ee), which is one of a kind in the world considering the searchable text and the planned amount of the data. The portal will be presented on 15 October at 11.00 in the National Library of Estonia. 

The new portal DIGAR Estonian Newspapers has been compiled in order to provide searchable full-texts of Estonian and foreign Estonian newspapers since their publishing. This goal will be fully achieved by the end of 2015, since the papers from 1944-2013 are still missing and are currently added. Fresh papers can be found from the portal no later than on the following working day of the publishing, but their full-texts are made available according to the agreements with publishers.

The project is designed to do the following according to the statement:

Currently the portal gives access to 85 newspapers, including over 100 000 pages published before 1944 and papers issued since 1 January 2014. Also the newspapers digitised by the cooperation partners of the National Library will be made available through the portal. The newspapers provided by the Tartu University Library and Estonian Literary Museum are the first to come. 

The prospective key users of the portal are the researchers of language, media, history and genealogy and other fields, information specialists, creative industry and others in addition to the consumers of the everyday information.

DIGAR is a user environment created by the National Library, which currently provides access to the digital editions stored. Among them are e-books, newspapers, magazines, maps, sheet music, photographs, postcards, posters, illustrations, audio books, and music files. Books and periodicals format is usually pdf or epub, jpeg pildimaterjalil recordings and wav.

I managed to get all this information from the website in Estonian using Google Translate.