Finding your bookmarks and saved searches

If you’re returning to the British Newspaper Archive after the site update in July and can’t find your old bookmarks or saved searches, don’t worry! Nothing has been lost. Here’s where everything went, and why.

The Sketch | 24 October 1928

Everything migrated to Workspaces

When the new site is launched, all legacy bookmarks and saved searches will be preserved and moved into Workspaces, the new home for everything related to your research. To find them, sign in and open Workspaces from the main navigation. 

Finding your migrated content

Inside Workspaces, you’ll find folders containing your migrated content, organised and ready to continue working with. 

On the old site, bookmarks were a lightweight way to flag an article for later. On the new site, the ability to make bookmarks have been upgraded into full newspaper clippings, which means each one is now a proper research item you can revisit, annotate, share, organise into collections, and build on over time. 

Your bookmarks didn’t disappear — they evolved.

This gives you more control and flexibility than bookmarks ever offered, without asking you to do anything extra. Every article you saved is still there, just with more room to work with it. 

Why do my migrated bookmarks take me to the newspaper page instead of the specific article?

You may notice that clicking on a migrated bookmark currently takes you to the newspaper page it came from, rather than jumping straight to the specific article. This is a deliberate trade-off, and here’s the reasoning behind it. 

We’re preparing for a significant improvement to how articles are defined and displayed across the Archive. In the near future, we’ll be undertaking a full “rezoning” of the entire newspaper archive, which will make article boundaries far more accurate and consistent. 

Because of this upcoming work, remapping all existing bookmarks to today’s article zones would only deliver limited short-term value. Those zones will soon change, so relinking everything now would risk creating further inconsistencies, or even broken links, once rezoning is complete. 

The rezoning work will bring a number of benefits: 

• More accurate article segmentation and navigation 
• Better search relevance and discoverability 
• A more consistent and reliable reading experience across the Archive 
• Contributing to better OCR capabilities 

The Sphere | 28 January 1928

We understand this may be frustrating in the short term, taking you to the page rather than the exact clipping isn’t the ideal experience, and we don’t want to pretend otherwise. But it’s intended to ensure a much higher-quality experience once the Archive has been fully re-processed, rather than linking you accurately today only to break that link again shortly after.

Saved searches: kept for reference, not carried forward

Your saved searches have also been migrated and are accessible in your Workspace folders. But it’s worth being transparent: saved searches aren’t a feature we’ll be continuing to support on the new site. 

Usage patterns from the old site told a clear story: very few saved searches were ever revisited, and most users found it faster to re-run or adjust a search manually than to retrieve a saved version. At the same time, the new search experience is significantly quicker to work with, making it easy to rebuild a complex search in seconds. You can of course save a search as a bookmark in your browser as before.

That said, your saved searches have been retained rather than deleted, so they remain available as a record of past research intent if you need to refer back to them. We have had to translate old search syntax into new search syntax so you may find that your results have changed a little and this will be true for any searches you have saved locally as browser bookmarks or saved URLs etc. We’ve mapped to the ‘closest/best’ equivalent in the new syntax in each case.

How to make the most of Workspaces going forward

Workspaces are built around how research actually happens, iteratively, across many sessions, and over time. Rather than saving searches you may never return to, the emphasis is now on saving what matters: the evidence itself. 

• Organise clippings into themed folders or collections 
• Bring together material from multiple searches 
• Add notes and context as your thinking develops 
• Keep long-running research structured and accessible 

If the new layout feels unfamiliar at first, that’s entirely normal. But your research is still there, and you now have more powerful tools to build on it.

Need a hand finding something? If you’re unsure where content has landed or how to use Workspaces effectively, our help guides and support team are ready to assist. The Archive is as rich as ever, now it’s just easier to turn discoveries into insight. 

Questions about the migration? Visit our help centre or get in touch with the support team.