British Library to digitise 40 million news pages

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The British Library has one of the largest collections of newspapers in the world, but the 30,000 researchers accessing the archive each year must make a trip to North London to see the pages.

That's set to change as the library has teamed up with digital firm brightsolid to scan and push the collection online.

The aim is to get four million pages up a year over the next decade, the British Library noted. Initially, the library will digitise the older bits of its massive collection, which covers 300 years from 52,000 newspapers.

Any content older than 1900 is out of copyright, but the library is hoping to include new pages by working with the rights holders to gain permission.

The website for the project should be available with the first round of content from next year, British Library chief executive Dame Lynne Brindley said. Accessing the collection will be free from computers at British Library locations, but there will be a fee for anyone else.

"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," she added.

Partner brightsolid will handle the tech side of the project, including scanning the 40 million documents, at no charge to the British Library.

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