New Resources – British Library Newspapers

Sharon Nangle
Thursday 11 November 2021

Image: British Library Newspapers: A Digital Primary Source Archive. With images of newspapers

The University Libraries have recently purchased access to British Library Newspapers parts III-V to add to parts I&II which we already had, to give complete access to all of the content available. British Library Newspapers is hosted on the Gale Primary Sources platform, and links can be found on the Newspapers guide and the A-Z Databases list.

Sourced from the extensive collections of the British Library, more than 160 newspaper titles are available, providing access to around 5.5 million pages of historical newspaper content, including articles, editorials, notices, letters and advertisements, from local and regional newspapers, published between 1732-1950.

British Library Newspapers Part I & II: 1800-1900 – These two collections include English and Welsh regional newspapers of the 19th Century. The collection includes radical publications, such as Chartist Northern Star, Morning Chronicle, and the Examiner, alongside conservative publications, such as The Standard and The Morning Post.

British Library Newspapers Part III: 1740-1950 (new) – Includes more regional publications, alongside specialist titles like Poor Law Unions’ Gazette, and historically significant publications such as the Westmoreland Gazette.

British Library Newspapers Par IV: 1732-1950 (new) – A collection of earlier newspapers, including the Stamford Mercury and magazines such as Scots Magazine. You’ll also find the 1901-1950 run of the Aberdeen Journal and the Dundee Courier.

British Library Newspapers Part V: 1746-1950 (new) – This collection focuses on the North of Britain, including Scotland, Northern England and the Midlands.

There’s a basic search page which allows you to search using keywords, names, and topics. The Advanced search allows you to combine a range of search terms, limit a search to specific collections, document type (Advertisements, Article, Editorial, etc.), by publication title, and by country or city.

British Library Newspapers allows you to see an image of the original article:

Image of a newspaper article with the headline Titanic sinking in Mid-Atlantic.
Copyright Cengage, British Library Newspapers

 

Or view the article alongside an OCR version (Optical Character Recognition):

An image of a newspaper article with the headline Titanic Sinking Mid-Atlantic, alongside an image of an OCR version of the article.
Copyright Cengage: British Library Newspapers

Or you can choose to see the article within the context of the page:

Image of a page of a newspaper with an article highlighed with the heading Sinking in Mid-Atlantic.
Copyright Cengage: British Library Newspapers

British Newspapers Archive

We get requests from time to time for a similar product to British Library Newspapers, called British Newspaper Archive. British Newspaper Archives is a collaboration between the British Library and findmypast. Whilst the British Newspaper Archive is available for individuals and public Libraries to buy, it isn’t available for Higher Education, however most of the content of the British Newspaper Archive is included in British Library Newspapers.

You can view all our newspaper resources in the Newspapers guide, and see our new resources guide for details of all the new e-resources we have, and to see details of e-resources we have trial access to.

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