Comment by TrackerFF
5 days ago
I'm a Norwegian, and I use the national library almost every day for searching through texts. They have truly one of the best working user interfaces (and functionality) for searching through the massive amounts of text.
It's really fantastic. I just wished there were fewer restrictions on the content that is accessible.
(a lot is only accessible from Norwegian IP addresses, so it's one of the main reasons I maintain a VPN as I'm Norwegian but live in the UK; a second set is only available from the IP addresses of libraries or research institutions - still huge amounts that are generally available, though)
My biggest gripe with it are the restrictions, indeed.
When searching through the closed newspapers, you have to apply for access manually, which gives you 8 hours of access. Great. Only that the access is seemingly manually granted - so if you apply 16:05 on a Friday, chances are you won't get any access until 9-10 the next Monday.
With that said, I do understand why it is like that. If people could apply via API, and get instant access, they would probably just stop buying newspaper subscriptions.
I actually didn't realise you could apply. I always just went back and ignored the closed ones without reading closely enough apparently. Thanks for making me aware - there are a few that's relevant to me for genealogy reasons that I've not looked at because of this.
Silly question but can a non-Norwegian also access it? Willing to pick up some Norwegian along the way ;-)
You can access quite a bit directly. Check out nb.no (or https://www.nb.no/en/ for an English version of the page, but of course most of the works are in Norwegian)
There are escalating series of restrictions, basically:
* Available for everyone.
* Available from a Norwegian IP -> just requires a VPN.
* Available from Norwegian libraries
* Availble under "special conditions". This would mean from a participating research institution or university, or similar.
Pretty much everything that is out of copyright falls in the first category. The second and third categories has a bunch of copyrighted material where the copyright holders have granted limited usage rights. A bunch of newspaper archive material that is still under copyright (but sadly not the biggest ones) are available from Norwegian IPs for example.
If you have access to a Norwegian IP, then yes.
The lack of a universal search engine is very frustrating. Why can't I search within TV subtitles?
Well... You realize how used you are to the basic stemming and spelling flexibility which every search engine has had since Altavista.