British Newspaper Archive - 300 years of history online

Sixty-five million historic newspaper articles, covering the most significant events over the last 300 years, are now fully available online from today in a new archive created by the British Library.

People will now be able to search the ‘British Newspaper Archive’, which is made up of four million pages - containing articles from local and regional papers going back to 1700, for details about members of their family who may have been eminent in their local communities hundreds of years ago.

The launch of the archive is the first time people will be able to digitally access and search through millions of newspaper articles from the comfort of their homes. Up until now, people have had to travel to the British Library newspaper depository in Colindale, North London, to access the entire collection of 200 local and regional newspapers.

However, anyone wishing to fully access the newspaper archive will have to pay to do so. People can search the site for free but will need to pay either £6.95 for 48 hour access; £29.95 for 30 days or £79.95 for an annual subscription. Once logged in, users can download a pdf of a particular page to keep forever. The archive can be accessed for free in the British Library’s Reading rooms.

The digitisation project, which started last year, will take 10 years to complete, with a total of 650 million articles on 40 million web pages expected to be in the finished archive by 2020. British company Brightsolid, which also owns Friends Reunited and Genes Reunited, is responsible for digitising the archive - a painstaking process as much of it needs to be done by hand as so many of the pages of the newspapers are too fragile to be processed by machines.

This could be applicable to our customers who can use the index on the pay website, but might be able to interlibrary loan the newspaper microfilm.


http://www1.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

Sue