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This week at The Archive we have added an amazing 293,242 brand new pages, with 29 brand new titles joining us from Scotland, Wales and eighteen English counties. Meanwhile, we have also been busy attending to our existing titles, with 60 of these updated in all over the past seven days. With all these brand new pages added to The Archive, we now have over 48 million pages available to search, with the milestone of 50 million pages on the horizon.So read on to…

As we move now into February we have been extremely busy here at The Archive, adding 139,438 brand new pages to our collection, with the addition of two brand new titles over the past seven days. Meanwhile, we have made significant updates to a range of our existing titles, with 26 titles updated in all.So read on to discover more about our two new titles of the week, one of which represented the interests of the various Nonconformist Protestant groups of…

One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool.  This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive.  OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text.   The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text.  However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement.  As a group, we…

As we welcome a new month, we at the Archive take the opportunity to delve into historical events that have occurred in the month of May over the years.Lewis and ClarkOn 14 May 1804, Lewis and Clark departed St Louis on their expedition west. It was the first American expedition to explore the western half of the United States. The expedition was ordered by President Jefferson following the Louisiana Purchase to, in part, map this newly acquired territory. The journey…

The Lusitania arrived in New York on 13 September 1907, after completing the crossing of the Atlantic in 5 days and just under two hours – thus just missing out on ‘the Blue Ribbon’, then held by ‘The Deutschland’.To mark the day, here is a newspaper report about this historic event.Read our blog post about the sinking of the Lusitania…

Historical newspaper reports on the sinking of the LusitaniaOn 7 May 1915, the Lusitania was hit by torpedoes fired by the German U-boat U-20, and sank in 20 minutes with the loss of 1,198 lives.To mark the day, here are some newspaper reports about the tragedy.…