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Six people who have helped correct millions of lines of text online in the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation program were presented with special Australia Day awards.

The award recipients were the top text correctors in the program’s hall of fame: Julie Hempenstall from Victoria, Maurie and Lyn Mulcahy from Queensland, Fay Walker from Queensland, John Hall from Victoria and Ann Manley from NSW.

The newspaper digitisation program holds over 100 newspapers from each state and territory from 1803 to 1955, and includes one million pages and 11 million articles. Newspapers are scanned into National Library computers as images, then converted to searchable text with optical character recognition software. Sometimes the software is not able to convert text correctly and it misinterprets some characters. To solve this problem the NLA opened its system to the public, allowing Australians to correct the text themselves.

The result of the digitisation program is a fully-searchable online database of newspapers from the last two centuries. It includes Australia’s first newspaper the Sydney Gazette, the Argus from 1846-1945, and the first 100 years of the Sydney Morning Herald, with more to be digitised this year.

The top text corrector among the 7,000 registered users is Julie Hempenstall, who corrected over 352,000 lines of text. A stay-at-home Mum with two kids in central Victoria, just south of Bendigo, she didn’t expect the award when volunteering her time, sometimes spending up to eight hours a day correcting text.

After the award presentation in the NLA theatre, recipients viewed treasures from the collection and experienced a demonstration of Trove, the library’s new search engine. Trove provides access to over 47 million resources including books, audiobooks, journals and magazines that have been archived by the library and can be searched simultaneously.