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An exciting feature of the new British Newspaper Archive will be the advanced search capabilities that are coming to the site.Searching historic newspapers has always been a balancing actSearching historic newspapers has always been a bit of a tightrope walk. Search too narrowly and you miss the articles you need. Cast the net too wide and you’re wading through pages of irrelevant results. Throw in inconsistent spelling, occasionally damaged print, and the inevitable quirks of Optical Character Recognition…

This week we have added an icon of British teenage life to our Archive, DC Thomson’s best-selling teen magazine, none other than Jackie. A weekly magazine for girls, Jackie was a cultural phenomenon.We’ve published every single edition of Jackie here at The Archive, running from 1964 through to 1993. That means we’ve added 51,474 pages of purely Jackie this week, a lively and bright smorgasbord of everything that appealed to a young teenage girl in the latter half of the twentieth century.…

Here at The Archive, we love to learn of the discoveries you have made through our newspaper pages, and how you have used them, whether they have influenced novels, or provided information for dissertations. We were incredibly grateful, therefore, when crime writer and athletics historian Peter Lovesey contacted us with his account of sixty years of researching newspapers. From accessing historical newspapers in their original form, to scrolling through microfilm reels, and finally to searching newspapers digitally on the British…

We’re starting this week off with a bang as we have added 218,828 brand new pages to The Archive, as we investigate the 1964 ‘Battle of Pier Gap,’ in which mods and rockers clashed in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. Meanwhile, we’ve added one brand new title to The Archive, the East Essex Advertiser and Clacton News, as well as making extensive updates to our existing titles from across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.From Croydon to Clacton, from South Bank to South Devon, read…

The popularity of walking or ‘hiking,’ as it is termed, is amazingly on the increase. ‘Sabbath day journeys’ are undertaken by the youth of both sexes, armed with knapsacks. Starting from Waterloo to the Surrey hills and commons, where they walk, either in clubs or in private companies, or alone, all day, to return by train at night.So relates The Sphere in the September of 1930 in an article entitled ‘Knapsackery on the Surrey Hills.’ Regarded as the ‘Phenomenon of…

‘…coloured velvet collars and cuffs, trousers that were so tight they couldn’t sit down in them, belts on the back of their jackets, long narrow ties like bootlaces,’  this is of course the style of the Teddy Boys, the British youth subculture which defined the 1950s, as described in the Londonderry Sentinel.The Sphere | 22 September 1956The Teddy Boys, embracing the Edwardian style of decades before, were a threat to the status quo in a way that Britain had never quite…

During our first ever webinar, we have over 600 questions from more than 3,500 registered viewers. It was incredible to get so much feedback and interaction from our viewers.  Here we will share a sample of the questions from our webinar event.Didn’t get a chance to see the webinar?  Watch the event now.(The discount offer is no longer valid)QuestionsSometimes I try to find a name in the newspaper archive and it says there are no matches. Why and…

“I won’t be embarrassed by what I discover, bring it on! Let’s have an adventure.” – Warwick DavisIn last night’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? we joined Warwick Davis, best known for his acting career, as he uncovered a few family secrets including bigamy and multiple marriages on his mother’s side of the family, as well as tragedy and another successful performer on his father’s side.Searching for a Local PubWarwick wanted to find out about…

This step-by-step guide will show you how to search newspapers from a specific date range (such as World War One) at The British Newspaper Archive.Watch this short video tutorial or follow the steps below:Search the newspapersHow to search newspapers from World War OneThe easiest way to limit your search to a particular date range is to use the advanced search. You can get to this by clicking the ‘advanced search’ button on the homepage. Type the…

Recently, several people have asked us when the newspaper library at Colindale will be closing and the print newspapers moving to Boston Spa. In June, the British Library confirmed that the Colindale site in North London will close on Friday 8 November 2013.As many of you will already know, the content on the BNA website comes from the British Library’s amazing newspaper collection at Colindale – which contains over 750 million pages from local, regional and national newspapers, as well as periodicals. But…