Good news for historians and researchers or anyone who enjoys reading old news, over the next ten years the British Library has decided to put millions of newspapers into digital format online for the first time.
At the moment the library has approximately 750 million newspapers including 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles.
The Scottish based firm Brightsolid will work with the British library to digitise around 40 million pages from a selection of these newspapers covering significant events over the past 300 years.
Some pages from newspapers post 1900 will be digitised too but as these are still in copyright, there will be negotiations with the copyright holders first.
“Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail” said Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of The British Library.
“Mass digitisation unlocks the riches of our newspaper collections by making them available online to users across the UK and around the world
“By making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print.
“It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than travelling to a physical location” she added.
You won’t have to pay for searching the digital content onsite at the library itself but you will have to pay for access to the newspapers via the website but it would certainly be a lot cheaper and more convenient than travelling in person to the library and spending hours searching for information, I’d much rather use my laptop instead.
“Digitisation will mean that those people who haven’t previously been able to access the physical resource will now be able to access it from anywhere at any time” said Chris van der Kuyl, Chief Executive of Brightsolid.
“It will also offer a unique insight into major events and key periods of historical interest” he said.
In the first two years over 4 million pages will be turned into digital format but the entire project is expected to take 10 years to complete.
Interesting stuff, I wonder why they haven’t thought about doing that before, makes sense and it will bring in cash, and I’m sure people won’t mind paying to access the information, I don’t.
