On November 29, 2011, The British Library and the online publisher brightsolid launched the Web site British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk). For this project, brightsolid employees are digitizing (producing digital copies) of millions of pages of newspapers articles in the British Library’s collection. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it would be like if the Library of Congress turned to Facebook to make digital copies of American newspapers and put the digital copies on-line.
The British Library (www.bl.uk) is the national library of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. According to The British Library, “It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection.” Its collections include 150,000,0000 items “from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.”
According to The British Library, the Web site “will transform the way that people use historical newspaper to find out about the past. The British Newspaper Archive website will offer access to up to 4 million fully searchable pages, featuring more than 200 newspaper titles from every part of the UK and Ireland. The newspapers – which mainly date from the 19th century, but which include runs dating back to the first half of the 18th century – cover every aspect of local, regional, and national news.”
In May of 2010, The British Library announced the beginning of a ten-year partnership with brightsolida subsidiary of Dundee, Scotland-based publisher DC Thomson. In the past year, the brightsolid digitization team working at the British Library’s Newspaper Library in Colindale has been digitizing up to 8,000 historic newspaper pages per workday. The expectation is that over a period of ten years, they will scan up to 40,000,000 newspaper pages.
Until now, the digitization project has concentrated on newspapers published before 1900 for which copyrights have expired. However, brightsolid is negotiating with various copyrightholders to gain permission to digitize newspapers from the early-to-middle-decades of the 20th Century.
The British Library stated, in May of 2010, “The copyright material will, with the express permission of the publishers, be made available via the online resource – providing fuller coverage for users and a much-needed revenue stream for the rightholders.” The Web site will continue to grow as freshly-scanned pages are uploaded to the site.
In a press release back then, The British Library stated that it selected brightsolid in accordance with the European Union (EU) procurement process. The company had “previously delivered the highly successful 1911census.co.uk project in partnership with the National Archives (TNA) and owns the leading family history [Web sites] findmypast.co.ul and genesreunited.co.uk. brightsolid is taking on the commercial and technical risks of the project, with no direct costs to the British Library. The firm will … [digitize] content from the British Library Newspaper Library, which it will then make available online via a paid-for website as well as integrating it into family history websites.”
In November of 2011, Chris van der Kuyl, CEO of brightsolid, stated, “We’ve unearthed national treasures at the turn every page.” He elaborated, “All human life is here; from a man who decided one day to walk around the world in an iron mask, to bullet-stopping corsets and the art of wide-sleeved shoplifting – this is a digital Aladdin’s Cave. The 65 million stories available online today, taken together, are the story of the UK and we’re adding 120,000 stories a day, so you’ll be able to uncover what life was liken in your street, your town and your area.”
Bob Satchwell, Executive Director of the Society of Editors, stated, “The British Newspaper Archive website opens up a magical new window on a magnificent treasure store of real history, recording the lives of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in vibrant communities, rather than merely the cold facts of politics and pestilence. Thank goodness ageing newspapers are being brought back to life through new partnerships and modern, accessible media, to enthrall new generations.”
Ed King, Head of Newspapers for The British Library, stated, “The launch of the British Newspaper Archive website opens up the British Library’s newspaper collection as never before.” King pointed out, “Rather than having to view the items on-site at the Library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and information contained in these pages – and the ability to search across millions of articles will yield results for each user, that might previously have been the work of weeks or months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse.”
“The British Library’s Newspaper Collection has a strong claim to be the published record of our shared national, regional and local memory,” stated Ed King. “By providing online access to that shared memory, the British Newspaper Archive website will transform the way that we tap into our past and made connections with generations who came before us.”
The British Library stated, “The launch and further expansion of the British Newspaper Archive website will help the British Library to fulfil its strategic goals of long-term preservation of and access to the national newspaper collection. The Library’s newspaper strategy aims to secure the future of this unique resource by moving the hard-copy collections from the current building at Colindale to a purpose-built storage facility in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Access to the collection will be provided via microfilm and digital copies made available at the Library’s main site at St Pancras.”
In May of 2010, The British Library expected that brightsolid would digitize at least 4,000,000 newspaper pages in the first two years of the project and over ten years “deliver up to 40 million pages as the mass digitisation process becomes progressively more efficient and as in-copyright content is scanned following negotiation with rightholders.”
On Wednesday, May 19, 2010, Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of The British Library, announced that The British Library had entered into the partnership with brightsolid, which the British Library described as “owner of online brands including findmypast.co.uk and Friends Reunited.” The British Library expected the partnership would “deliver…up to 40 million historic pages from the national newspaper collection…making large parts of this unparalleled resource available online for the first time.”
Founded as Scotland Online in1995, brightsolid has two divisions: brightsolid Online Publishing and brightsolid Online Technology. The former has a number of on-line businesses, including Friends Reunited, and the latter is an independent provider of on-line IT (information technology) business services. In a press release, The British Library stated the brightsolid Online Technology division manages “information availability and online presence through hosting, internet access, applications and business continuity products and services.”
In a partnership between the General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, and the Court of the Lord Lyon, brightsolid Online Publishing has managed ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, the official genealogy website for Scottish ancestry, since 2002. Five years later, in 2007, brightsolid acquired findmypast.com, which is a family history Web site recently re-named Findmypast.co.uk, which was the first Web site to put the complete English and Welsh birth, marriage, and death indexes on-line.
In March of 2010, the company finished the acquisition of Friends Reunited Group. “Friends Reunited is the original social network with 23 million members. It was launched in 2000 to put old school friends back in touch with each other and swiftly became a British phenomenon. Friends Reunited Dating is one of the top paid dating websites in the UK. Sister site Genes Reunited was launched in 2003 and is currently the UK’s largest family history website with over 11 million members worldwide and 750 million names listed. This acquisition has further strengthened brightsolid’s expertise in the family history market.” The headquarters of brightsolid is in Dundee, like its parent company, D.C. Thomson, and it has offices in Edinburgh, Scotland and London.
At the Westminster eForum on May 19, 2010, Dame Lynne Brindleysaid, “I am delighted to announce the British Library’s partnership with brightsolid to embark upon the most significant programme of newspaper digitisation this country has ever seen.” She added, “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. 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. brightsolid have an excellent track record of digitising archive materials and making them available to new audiences – I look forward to announcing the web service resulting from this partnership, which will launch and then steadily grow from next year.”
As a side note, Londoninium was the capital of Roman Britain, but Westminster is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. In modern times, Greater London grew until it encompassed Westminster (and kept right on going).
The service will be available for free to visitors at the British Library. The British Library stated that “copies of all scanned materials will be deposited with the Library to be held in the national collection in perpetuity.”
The British Library described its collection in May of 2010 this way. “Spanning three centuries and including 52,000 local, regional, national and international titiles, the British Library holds one of the wolrd’s finest collections of newspapers. Each year the Newspaper Library at Colindale is used by 30,000 researchers in subjects ranging from family history and geneology to sports statistics, politics and industrial history. This vast resource is held mainly in hard copy and microfilm, necessitating a trip to the north of London site for people wishing to use the collection.”
Dame Lynn Brindley added, “The successof our 19th Century British Library Newspapers website demonstrated the public’s huge appetite for digitised historic newspaper content,” added Dame Lynne. “Our new partnership with brightsolid will enable us to deliver a huge increase in the amount of digitised material available – transforming access and searchability for users on and off-site and reducing wear-and-tear on our often fragile collection items. 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.”
Chris van der Kuy said, “We’re delighted to be working with the British Library on such an exciting project. 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. In particular it is an important resource for the genealogy community, which we are closely involved with through our brands findmypast.co.uk and genesreunited.co.uk, helping them to bring to life how their ancestors lived. It will also offer a unique insight into major events and key periods of historical interest.”
He added, “We’re also closely linked to the publishing community through our parent company, DC Thomson and we very much see this project as a collaboration with the industry. In fact we are already in dialogue with some rightsholders and expect this to continue throughout the project. As a business, our core strength is in building innovative online businesses around people and places, and this project fits perfectly within our expertise. We are looking forward to working with the British Library on this project and developing this hugely important online resource.”
Dame Lynn Brindley concluded, “The British Library’s newspaper archive is one of the world’s great newspaper collections. Through this partnership with brightsolid we will make millions more pages accessible more pages accessible more pages accessible – and to many more people.”
This will democraticize research for professional historians, history students and others doing historical research (such as journalists, genealogists, lawyers, and novelists). For historians, newspaper and magazine articles constitiute primary sources (as reporters record contemporary accounts of events that may include interviews with policymakers who set events in motion or witnesses of historic events). [Other examples of primary sources include diaries, laws, pamphlets, and autobiographies.] This is as opposed to secondary sources (books, magazine or journal articles written by professional or amateur historians – including journalists – that reconstruct events) based on primary sources (and often earler secondary sources) written years, decades, centuries, or millennia after an event took place.
If researchers do not have to visit the Newspaper Library in Colindale or can go there with specific ideas about where to look for the information they want to access, they can save time and money on their research. Most scholars are not financially independent and require grants from their own or other tertiary schools or foundations to fund their research. Further, whether or not a faculty member achieves tenure is often tied to how many scholarly works he or she can get published and how well received those works are by his or her peers.
The British Library stated, in May of 2010, the material “will include extensive coverage of local, regional, and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census between 1841 and 1911. Additional categories will be developed looking at key evenets and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. The aim will be to build a ‘critical mass’ of material for reseatchers – particularly in the fields of family history and geneology.”
In May of 2010, David Fordham, President of the Newspaper Society, pointed out this Web site will bring increased access to regional newspapers. Fordham said, “This initiative is a higely significant and exciting development which will unclockmany of the great newspaper treasures that lie within the millions of pages in the British Library Newspaper archive at Colindale. It represents a particularly exciting opportunity for regional newspapers which have a long and rich heritage and capture changing times in local and regional areas across the centuries. I look forward to watching the project develop and hope that it makes a major contribution to the industry.”
As a general rule of thumb, historians who deal with modern history are better off the more newspapers they can puruse. The more accounts of an event or series of events a historian can read, the fuller the picture of that event or series of events the historian can build in his (or her) mind and relate to readers and students in the classroom. The more firsthand accounts he he she can read, the more representative of reality his or her historical narrative or scholarly explanation for why something happened will be. A researcher who relies on one perspective, even that of a prestigious, big city newspaper can be mislead.
Ed Vaizey, Member of Parliament (MP), Minister of Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, said, in response to the Web site’s launch, “The British Newspaper Archive is a rich and hugely exciting resource, packed with historical detail. It’s a great example of the public and private sectors collabtorating to deliver sometging that neither party could have delivered by themselves. I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within seconds had 42,000 results – an indication of the breadth and variety of material found. I’m delighted that the British Librray and brightsolid are working together to transform access to the nation’s published memory.”
The British Library states the Web site provides “Exhaustive coverage of crime and punishment – from infamous murder trials to heart-rending stories of men, women and children transported to Australia for the most minor thefts (in one case, seven years transportation for the theft of seven cups and five saucers).” There are eyewitness “accounts of social transformation – newspaper reports, commentary and letters to the editor on topics ranging from the railway mania of the mid-19th century to the extraordinary expansion of the temperance movement.”
According to the British Library, “the aspirations and anxieties of the time laid bare in searchable ads and classifieds, peddling everything from the latest fashion to miracle cures for baldness and venereal disease.” They point out that newspaper articles of the past preserve not only the contemporary accounts of major historic events that fill textbooks and inspire novels, plays, and movies, but also give us insight about the daily lives of recent ancestors (provided one is British or part-British). “Alongside first-hand accounts of historic events such as the wedding of [Queen] Victoria and [Prince] Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade, these newspapers also provide countless vivid details of how our ancestors lived and died, how they went up and down in the world and how they fed, clothed and entertained themselves.”
The British Library stated, “The British Newspaper Archive is free to search. To view the content in a newspaper page image, there is a choice of time-limited PPV (Pay Per View) or subscription packages. There are two PPV options available: the £6.95 package that lasts for 48 hours, and the £29.95 package that lasts for 30 days. The subscription package is priced £79.95 for one year.”
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