+ The British Library is Partnering With Online Publisher Brightsolid
+ The Partnership is for 10 Years
+ The Collection:
Spanning three centuries and including 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles, the British Library holds one of the world's finest collections of newspapers.
+ From the Announcement:
The partnership between the British Library and brightsolid will enable the digitisation of a minimum of 4 million pages of newspapers over the first two years. Over the course of ten years, the agreement aims to deliver up to 40 million pages as the mass digitisation process becomes progressively more efficient and as in-copyright content is scanned following negotiation with rightsholders.
Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Additional categories will be developed looking at key events and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. The aim will be to build a 'critical mass' of material for researchers - particularly in the fields of family history and genealogy.
Access
This resource will be available for free to users on-site at the British Library and copies of all scanned materials will be deposited with the Library to be held in the national collection in perpetuity.
Along with out-of-copyright material from the newspaper archive - defined in this context as pre-1900 newspaper material - the partnership will also seek to digitise a range of in-copyright material, with the agreement of the relevant rightsholders. This copyright material will, with the express permission of the publishers, be made available via the online resource - providing fuller coverage for users and a much-needed revenue stream for the rightsholders.
Cost?
The cost of the 10-year digitization project wasn't immediately clear, but Sanderson said the process — from cleaning a single page to making a file of it — costs up to $1.40. (via AP)
In June 2009, the BL (in partnership with Gale and JISC) launched the 19th Century Newspaper Newspaper Archive. 2 million pages in public version and now approx. 4 million for institutions.
...contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1753 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date, making it easy for you to quickly explore historical content.
NewspaperARCHIVE.com is adding newspaper pages faster than you can search them - with one newspaper page added every second - that's over 80,000 images a day, or about 2.5 million pages per month!
Free from the Library of Congress & National Endowment for the Humanities.
View newspaper pages from 1880 to 1922 from the following states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
3. ProQuest's Historical and Black Historical Newspaper Collections
Worth noting that ProQuest service is by subscription and they also provide historical access to three UK papers, The Guardian and The Observer from 1790-2003 and The Scotsman from 1817-1950.
Papers Past contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1932 and includes 58 publications from all regions of New Zealand.
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