Europeana Newspapers is a European Commission-funded project which is refining, aggregating and giving researchers online access to historical newspaper content from 23 European libraries. It also offers free, open source tools which individual libraries can use to assess refinement quality and metadata standards in relation to their own digital newspaper collections. The content made available by the project is available both through Europeana and a dedicated newspaper browser. Europeana is a way to see the newspapers in the context of over 30 million other items of cultural heritage, while the dedicated browser hosted on The European Library site gives researchers the possibility to refine their search terms (e.g. by date, publishing country, issue) and to search the full text of many newspapers. So far, the browser, which has been online for approximately one year, has proven popular with researchers, and further improvements to its functionality are planned in 2015. This could include the ability for users to tag articles or to edit, and help correct, the full text of individual articles.

No abstract

Recently, three important rivers in Asia and Oceania were acknowledged as legal persons. Questions emerge, such as: Which motivation drives the people who urged the respective courts and governments to grant these rivers legal personhood, in other words, to create Rights of Nature? Do these events lead to transformative social innovation and change our perspectives of how we see nature? As methodology we employ doctrinal research, examining original legal documents and contemporary news sources concerning the three grassroots initiatives on the rivers. The analysis reveals that there are different reasons for proposing this innovative legal approach of creating Rights of Nature. They include: providing people access to clean rivers for drinking water, sanitation, transportation and agricultural purposes; preventing the river from disappearing; addressing the issue of pollution and toxicity of river water; acknowledging the divine status of the river; and honouring indigenous beliefs concerning the river. The research findings demonstrate transformative social innovation: in all three cases, grassroots initiatives led to a system change. Moreover, dissemination of information concerning individual cases inspires other societal groups to reconsider the situation of their own ecosystems and to develop innovative governance possibilities, thereby honouring an alternative worldview in which human beings see themselves as part of nature rather than owning it just for utilitarian purposes.