Nine Entertainment is leading a five-year digitisation effort to unite 200 years of archives from The Sydney Morning Herald and other Nine titles into a single online archive, timed to mark the Herald’s 195th birthday in 2026 and its bicentenary in 2031.

The project aims to preserve The Sydney Morning Herald’s 195-year history within a consolidated digital collection that serves as a searchable archive for the public.

Overall, the initiative will create a single online archive for Nine Entertainment’s media brands, enabling broad access to historic content.

The work faces challenges reconciling more than a dozen legacy formats—from film and videotapes to photos, paper articles, CDs/DVDs, microfiche/film—along with issues like sticky shed syndrome in magnetic tapes that require processes such as baking to enable playback.

The project includes an updated publication timeline and emphasizes digitising historical newspapers to make them accessible to the public.

Among the archival finds are items like the first edition of the Sydney Herald from 1831, early pages with classifieds and poetry, plus historical cartoons and staff files illustrating the paper’s evolution.

Sydney-based photo archivist Harry Hollinsworth salvaged at-risk negatives from the 1950s and other eras, saving about 1,900 images despite acetate degradation risks, capturing moments such as the Melbourne 1956 Olympics and notable appearances by Liz Taylor, Mike Dodd, Dame Shirley Bassey, and a surviving Maureen O’Hara image.

Nine Entertainment’s leadership frames digitisation as essential to preserving Australia’s history, protecting democracy and local journalism for future generations.

The project spans about 150,000 hours of broadcast video, millions of photos and negatives, and extensive microfilm from multiple mastheads, prioritising material not yet preserved and making it accessible across The Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, and The Sun.

Leaders emphasize that a well-indexed past will unlock future value, with ongoing digitisation and metadata enhancements intended to enable unforeseen use cases.

Readers are informed about the timeline and scope of the archive initiative as it progresses.

The digitisation effort is a core part of Nine Entertainment’s broader strategy for digital preservation and media consolidation.