Interesting facts about the British Library:<p>- It requires every physical book published in the UK to be collected by the Library (since 1662)<p>- It has 60 million individual newspaper editions<p>- In 1999, the Library earmarked 60,000 volumes of non-British newspapers for disposal because it was running out of storage space (inviting criticism)<p>- The newspapers were offered to overseas museums, or put up for auction. But the short notice given to museums meant many were unable to accept them (they also needed time to free up physical space)<p>- The American writer Nicholson Baker used his own retirement money to purchase "2000 bound volumes of American newspapers - the last remaining copies in the world - including a complete run of the Chicago Tribune from 1888 to 1958 and hundreds of editions of Joseph Pulitzer's ground-breaking colour broadsheet of the 1890s, the New York World." [1]<p>- The physical copies of the American newspapers were saved and become part of the <i>American Newspaper Repository</i> [2] a non-profit organisation which Baker founded. In 2004, the collection moved to Duke University.<p>- Baker went on to publish a book of the whole affair in 2001 called <i>Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper</i>. The Guardian published an interview with him in 2002 (below)<p>[1] <i>Paper Chase</i>: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/22/museums.referenceandlanguages" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/22/museums.re...</a><p>[2] From an archived copy of the <i>American Newspaper Repository</i> website: "Research libraries everywhere, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Research Libraries, have replaced most of their often richly illustrated sets of late 19th and 20th century newspapers with black and white microfilm."
This is great. Historical newspapers are one of the largest corpora of information that has yet to be adequately brought on line.<p>In the U.S. the Library of Congress has digitized a fair number, but at the state and local level it's really hit or miss. Some states such as California and New York have put quite a bit on line, but many others rely on individual towns and historical societies.<p>Different pay services cover various papers, but there has never been concerted effort to digitize the staggering amount of microfilm that is out there.
Direct link to the site:
<a href="https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/</a>
I just came back from - actually, physically - visiting the British Library last week to do some research in the newsroom with microfilm and all.<p>Title of this piqued my interest, but looking at the details, but the selection of papers they're adding seems kinda meh. Mostly the sort of local papers that British Newspaper Archive always had, and still can't compete with the horrendously proprietary Gale and ProQuest archives, which have national papers (Guardian, Observer, etc) and require physically turning up to the library to use.<p>I used to have a pay-as-you-go subscription to BNA, to spite the monthly pay option that I figure I wouldn't make the most of, but it quite scandalously "expired".
Trove does this for Australian newspapers<p><a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/" rel="nofollow">https://trove.nla.gov.au/</a>
Latvia has it's own digital library of periodicals. It was digitized in few projects, and was made available to general reader (via periodika.lv) for free, except last 60 or so years, which were subject to copyright. However, when pandemic came, digital library became available for everyone without any copyright deductions.
I wish more institutions 'tested the waters' with these copyright laws.<p>Put a newspaper up from 100 years ago and see if anyone complains, if they do; take it down. Subtract 10 years every year until someone does complain.
Do anyone know any existing effort on converting these scanned image to text corpus ( probably a new OCR model needed to be developed on these old text ) ? I think it would be more usable if they are in text form in terms of search and research purpose.
It's fascinating to read the British account of the American Revolutionary War in their newspapers. Many people were sympathetic, and it wasn't the top story most days. Just some trouble in the colonies.<p>See: <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/07/03/how-did-the-british-press-cover-the-american-revolution/" rel="nofollow">https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/07/03/how-did-the-british-pre...</a>
> <i>The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication.</i><p>It's depressing that copyright has been extended so far it's now longer then any single individual's possible lifetime.
The irony is that they gave money to the digitisation of newspapers, but this outfit then charged money fir it abs cut out the general public.<p>Hopefully this will be like Australia’s Trove.