About the British Newspaper Archive

The British Newspaper Archive is an online newspaper archive created in partnership with Findmypast, the family history website owned by Scottish publishing powerhouse DC Thomson, and the British Library. Launched in November 2011 to preserve, digitise and make the British Library’s newspaper holdings more accessible, the British Newspaper Archive now hosts the largest collection of historical British and Irish newspaper pages anywhere online. 

The British Library is home to a mammoth collection of historical newspapers. Looking after over 600,000 bound volumes of newspapers, the equivalent of twenty miles of shelving, and 300,000 reels of microfilm, totalling some eight miles of shelving, previously it was only possible to view these newspapers by visiting the British Library. 

Since 2011, the British Newspaper Archive has digitised over 100 million newspaper pages, revolutionising the way that the British Library’s immense holdings can be discovered. All these millions of newspaper pages can be searched at the tap of the button, revealing stories from across five centuries of news. 

With national, regional, local and special interest titles all digitised on the British Newspaper Archive, the topics covered in our historical archive are as broad as your imagination. Whether you’re searching for stories about your forebears in a mining village, or tracing seismic events like the Irish famine, the British Newspaper Archive supports an incredibly wide range of research interests. 

With coverage dating from 1699 all the way to the 2010s, and newspapers now spanning five different continents, the British Newspaper Archive can tell many millions of stories, from remote villages in Scotland, to the shores of Barbados. What will you uncover in its pages? 

Our scanning team works onsite at the British Library’s campus at Boston Spa, Yorkshire. This means we have extensive access to the British Library’s holdings of historical newspapers, and because of this special access, we have been able to scan some of the Library’s rarest and most fragile newspapers.

Here at the British Newspaper Archive we scan from both paper holdings and from microfilm. Scanning from microfilm allows us to quickly digitise newspapers, whilst providing us with the longer time needed to scan from paper volumes. The scanning studio features state of the art scanning equipment, which is operated by highly knowledgeable scanning technicians. 

Once the newspaper pages are scanned, they travel to our operations centre in Dundee. We then run the digitised pages through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which ‘reads’ the pages and creates a text version of what is on the page. This is what allows you to search our newspaper collection. Although you might come across errors in the text, we are constantly running this data through an improvement process, to deliver to you the best possible experience of searching our newspaper archive. 

After some final quality checks, we then publish the new pages online. 

The team that brings you the British Newspaper Archive is based across the country. From our scanning studio in Boston Spa, to our operations centre in Dundee, we are also supported by our HQ at our London office on Fleet Street, from where we work to license and promote newspaper material. Meanwhile, ensuring the smooth flow of the operation are a dedicated team of Data Engineers, who are based across Scotland, London, and even further afield. 

As well as our landmark partnership with the British Library, we work with a variety of organisations to bring the project to life. 

Our core partnership with the British Library means that we work closely with them to select newspaper titles for digitisation, as well as collaborating with them on important projects like Heritage Made Digital and Living With Machines. Thanks to this partnership, we can digitise and publish newspapers that are deemed out of copyright. 

To publish in copyright newspapers, we work with a range of commercial publishers. This means we can bring you newspapers from the 20th and 21st centuries. Some of current partnerships are with Reach PLC, DC Thomson, Iliffe Media Group, and Mediahuis Ireland.  

We also work with regional libraries and archives to ensure that our coverage is complete as possible. Some of our current partnerships are with Shropshire Council and Cheshire West and Chester Borough Council. 

Finally, there are our technology and digitisation partners. We work with CCS, who supply image conversion software and OCR technology, and Intelligent Image Management Inc. Our hosting partner is brightsolid, in Dundee, Scotland.