NZZ Archive honored with 21st Century Achievement Award

In the first week of June, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) received the 21st Century Achievement Award for the digitization of its archive. The newspaper won in the "Media, Arts and Entertainment" category with its more than two million newspaper pages. As the NZZ reported on Friday, in 2004 several computer scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication began converting the printing ink of bygone days into machine-readable texts. As a result, NZZ employees can now search through 226 years of NZZ in a matter of seconds - right back to the first issue of January 12, 1780. For the time being, the archive is not yet directly accessible to outsiders and only to a limited extent. Every year since 1988, the 21st Century Achievement Award has honored "exceptional" achievements in the use of computer technology "for the good of society". 33 jury members, representing the major companies in the American computer industry, selected the ten winners from more than fifty finalists.