The DIGAR Estonian Newspaper Portal was officially launched on October 15, 2014 at The National Library of Estonia.  This Veridian collection includes digitized Estonian and Estonian foreign language newspapers from as early as 1821 to the present day. 
 
The National Library of Estonia commissioned this project to provide online access to the nation’s digitized newspapers within DIGAR, the National Library Digital Archive.  The collection launched with over 170,000 digitized newspaper pages including daily, weekly, local, and institutional papers.  Patrons can access and interact with the collection in a variety of ways, such as:

• Changing the language of the user interface to English, Estonian, or Russian
• Browsing through the collection by date, by type, and by name of publication
• Conducting full-text searches and refining search results by item type, time frame, and other criteria
• Registering to access crowdsourcing and personalization features such as adding tags to items, compiling private lists, sending lists to email accounts, and sharing information via social media

 The collection also includes safeguards for copyright restrictions which are handled differently depending on access rules.  In some cases, content is only available to users accessing the collection from within the library building.  In other cases, content is locked completely until restrictions are lifted on a specified date.
 
It has only been a few weeks since the launch of the Estonian Newspaper Portal and already it is proving to be quite popular.  There are currently 126 registered users, 44 of whom are using user text correction (UTC) to improve the content and engage with the collection.  So far, nearly 3,000 lines of text have been corrected. 
 
The preservation of and access to the rich history housed in this collection is something that will benefit patrons now and for many years to come, especially as additional content is added.