British Newspaper Archive

The former British Library Newspapers, Colindale, since demolished

The British Library Newspapers section was based in Colindale in north London, until 2013,^[1] and is now divided between the St Pancras and Boston Spa sites.^[2] The library has an almost complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840. This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869, which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total, the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km of shelves.

After the closure of Colindale in November 2013, access to the 750 million original printed pages was maintained via an automated and climate-controlled storage facility in Boston Spa.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} This opened in April 2014.^[8]

Available to all users, printed pages include news articles covering issues of local and regional importance, family notices, letters to editors written by newspaper readers, obituaries and advertisements.^[9]

As of 2021^[update], family history website Findmypast and the British Library announced an extension of their long term partnership; the British Newspaper Archive. The announcement confirmed the result of a further 14 million pages being uploaded for online publication over the next three years, including the addition of 1 million new free-to-access pages each year.^[10]

Digitisation

In May 2010, a ten-year programme of digitization of the newspaper archives with commercial partner DC Thomson subsidiary Brightsolid began.^[11][12] In November 2011, BBC News reported on the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, an initiative to facilitate online access to over one million pages of pre-20th century newspapers.^[13] The same newspapers from this partnership have also been made available to view on Findmypast and Genes Reunited.

As well as original paper scanning, the project also facilitated the scanning of existing microfilm, created by the British Library over the years.^[14] The digitisation project established an online search facility which people could consult without having to visit the British Library newspaper depository in person.^[15]

Among the collections are the Thomason Tracts, containing 7,200 17th-century news pamphlets and newsbooks,^[16] and the Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.^[17] The Thomason Tracts and Burney collections are held at St Pancras, and are available in digital facsimile.

The section also has extensive records of non-British newspapers in languages that use the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The library's substantial holdings of newspapers in the languages of Asia and the Middle East may be accessed at the library's reading rooms at St. Pancras.

Considered the most significant mass digitisation of newspapers the UK has seen, Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library, recalled: "Over the past decade, the British Newspaper Archive has transformed access to the extraordinarily rich collection of historic newspapers in our care. As well as protecting the fragile originals, digitisation has transformed the ways in which researchers can search newspaper content and make connections and discoveries that might never have been possible using print or microfilm."^[18]

Discover more about History related topics

Colindale

Colindale

Colindale is a district in the London Borough of Barnet; its main shopping street on the A5 forming the borough boundary with neighbouring Brent. Colindale is a suburban area, and in recent years has had many new apartments built. It's also the location of the 1960s-1970s Grahame Park housing estate, built on former parts of Hendon Aerodrome. It is situated about eight miles northwest of Charing Cross, directly northwest of Hendon, to the south of Edgware and east of Queensbury.

St Pancras, London

St Pancras, London

St Pancras is a district in north London. It was originally a medieval ancient parish and subsequently became a metropolitan borough. The metropolitan borough then merged with neighbouring boroughs and the area it covered now forms around half of the modern London Borough of Camden. The area of the parish and borough includes the sub-districts of Camden Town, Kentish Town, Gospel Oak, Somers Town, King's Cross, Chalk Farm, Dartmouth Park, the core area of Fitzrovia and a part of Highgate.

Boston Spa

Boston Spa

Boston Spa is a village and civil parish in the City of Leeds metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. Situated 3 miles (5 km) south of Wetherby, Boston Spa is on the south bank of the River Wharfe which separates it from Thorp Arch. According to the 2001 census, the parish had a population of 4,006 rising to 4,079 in the 2011 census.

Legal deposit

Legal deposit

Legal deposit is a legal requirement that a person or group submit copies of their publications to a repository, usually a library. The number of copies required varies from country to country. Typically, the national library is the primary repository of these copies. In some countries there is also a legal deposit requirement placed on the government, and it is required to send copies of documents to publicly accessible libraries.

Findmypast

Findmypast

Findmypast is a UK-based online genealogy service owned, since 2007, by British company DC Thomson. The website hosts billions of searchable records of census, directory and historical record information. It originated in 1965 when a group of genealogists formed a group named "Title Research". The first internet website went live in 2003.

British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

BBC News

BBC News

BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage. The service maintains 50 foreign news bureaus with more than 250 correspondents around the world. Deborah Turness has been the CEO of news and current affairs since September 2022.

Genes Reunited

Genes Reunited

Genes Reunited, originally known as Genes Connected, is a genealogy website that was launched in the UK in 2003 as a sister-site to Friends Reunited. It has over 13 million members and over 780 million names listed.

Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions, it forms the Latin script that is used to write English and other modern European languages. With modifications, it is also used for other alphabets, such as the Vietnamese alphabet. Its modern repertoire is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Cyrillic script

Cyrillic script

The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia.

Roly Keating

Roly Keating

Sir Roland Francis Kester Keating is Chief Executive of the British Library. He took up his post in September 2012.

While access within the British Library is free, online access is via a subscription system based on daily or item charges, £12.95 monthly or yearly fees of up to £79.95 as of July 2019. New visitors may access three free page views and explore hundreds of national, regional and local titles dating from the 1700s–2000s.^[19]

As part of The Wikipedia Library, Brightsolid provided free one-year subscriptions to a limited number of experienced Wikipedia editors from July 2014.^[20] The agreement was terminated in 2016 because "structural changes at their parent organisation(s) mean that there is no longer interest in continuing the partnership with The Wikipedia Library".

Reviews of the service have been mixed, with some early responses complimentary about the ability to access and search the large data sets.^[21][22] However, there have been complaints of the excessive cost and the general policy of the British Library allowing a private company the rights to the newspapers.^[23][24] One writer noted that: "The BNA demonstrates what happens to our cultural heritage when there is no political will for public investment. The nineteenth-century newspaper press was one of the period's greatest achievements but, rather than celebrate it, opening it up and giving it back to the nation, the British Library have been forced to sell it off."^[25]

The search Interface has also been criticised for problems in identifying where the searched terms are on the retrieved pages, and in the unreliability of the web interface, with bugs preventing images loading and regular crashes.^[26]