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Ed King
Ed King, the head of the British Library's newspaper collection Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Ed King, the head of the British Library's newspaper collection Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

British Library creates a "national memory' with digital newspaper archive

This article is more than 12 years old
Public will eventually be able to browse more than 40m newspaper pages

"It's an absolute fact. The history of the newspaper publishing industry is the history of failure," says Ed King, the charismatic head of the British Library's newspaper collection. King paints a bleak picture – but he is overseeing the library's ambitious attempt to make millions of pages of yesterday's chip paper available online for the first time. This, he claims, could give "short-lived, ephemeral titles" a second birth.

The library is one year into its plan to digitise 40m news pages from its vast 750m collection, housed in Colindale, north London. This autumn, the library will reinvent its cavernous vaults as a website, where amateur genealogists and eager historians will be able to browse 19th-century newsprint from their home computer.

"This is going to be a huge bonus for us," says King, one of Britain's most celebrated librarians. "It's been available for 80 years here. It will now be further available much, much more widely than just here, so people don't have to come up the Northern Line."

About half a million newspaper pages have been scanned to date. Fewer than a dozen staff clean, copy and upload roughly 8,000 pages a day – about enough to cover a football pitch. When it goes live, the site aims to display more than 1.5m pages, with 4m pages uploaded by the end of next year.

But the website – which will be freely accessible for Colindale visitors, but charge a modest sum to online users – is intended to be more than an internet archive of centuries-old newspapers. It will be an evolving encyclopedia of historical events, a compendium of stories of how people lived and died. In short, it will serve as a "national memory", King says.

For example, a census search for Sarah Ann Selway turns up a nondescript record of a woman, living in Bath in 1901. A further search at findmypast.co.uk reveals that Selway died two years later, aged 62. But the Bath Chronicle, now owned by Northcliffe Media, reported on 17 December 1903: "Annie Selway, daughter, said her mother had a very bad cold two days before she died. On Thursday night she complained of shortness of breath, and finding she did not get better she called her landlady. Her mother got a little better, but shortly after passed away." Selway, a widow, died of heart failure on 11 December 1903 – a hitherto locked away piece of genealogy.

The British Library has created a partnership with Brightsolid, the online publisher behind Friends Reunited and five family history websites, for the ambitious project. It is not difficult to envisage how three centuries of searchable newspaper archive could co-exist with its existing sites, including Genes Reunited, ancestorsonboard.com and 1911census.co.uk.

Tim Martin, the managing director of Brightsolid, says plans for exactly what the website will do are in the early stages – but he is hopeful. "[Searching family histories] gets even more exciting. Once you get these pages online and you evolve them, you get 'someone looked at this, who also looked at this', and you'll get people sharing things, potentially tagging content and making comments on it. That takes it in really exciting directions."

The British Library is cautious in its approach to the thorny issue of copyright, initially drawing the line at digitising post-1900 material. The "national memory" still bristles at the mention of James Murdoch, who described himself as "very, very concerned" about the library's plans in May last year. However, archiving a wealth of material from the first world war and Britain's burgeoning suffragette movement remains the ambition.

Martin, on the other hand, likes the idea of digitally archiving the 73-year history of the Beano. Brightsolid is owned by the Beano's Dundee-based publisher, DC Thomson. "We've got some good discussions going on. We may well do some of the family things – that's an even easier copyright discussion," he says. "I would like to bring this forward and do stuff from the first half of the 20th century, but we'll only do that when we've got the green light from copyright holders. But there's plenty to be cracking on with from the 18th and 19th centuries."

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