News collections at the

British Library

Luke McKernan

Lead Curator, News and Moving Image

Europeana Newspapers

Enabling Access to Digitised Historic Newspapers

9 June 2014

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News at the British Library

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Moving from a world-class newspaper service to a world-

class news service

Newspapers, television, radio and Web news

Reflection of the significant changes in news production

and consumption taking place today, but it also reflects

how news has always been consumed

News does not exist in any one form. It is sought out and

selected by its users, from the multiple forms of

information on offer

Such an understanding of news places the user at the

heart of the process

News content strategy

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Newspapers

The UK national collection

34,000 newspaper titles: approximately 60M issues or 450M individual pages, from 17thC to present day

Current acquisition: 1,500 daily or weekly titles

Print copies acquired under legal deposit but will move increasingly towards digital acquisition

Physical access at Newsroom and Boston Spa

Online access to 8M pages via British Newspaper Archive (http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.com) developed with DC Thomson Family History

Approximately third of collection has microfilm access copies; just under 2% has been digitised

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Newspaper collection highlights

Thomason Tracts – 7,200 Civil War and other 17thC

newsbooks and newspapers

Burney Collection – 700 bound volumes of newspapers

1603-1818

British and Irish newspapers collected under legal

deposit since 1869

Overseas newspapers from 1631 onwards, with

extensive British Commonwealth and other overseas

titles (just under 100 titles currently received)

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Newspaper preservation

£33M government-funded Newspaper Programme to

ensure long-term preservation of newspaper collection

Newspaper Library at Colindale closed, dedicated new

store at Boston Spa in Yorkshire

Optimum temperature and humidity controls, low

oxygen

Automated storage and retrieval mechanisms

Policy of surrogate-first – we provide access to print

newspapers only where a microfilm or digital access

copy does not exist

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Television and radio news

Began recording television and radio news

programmes receivable in the UK in May 2010

Collection of almost 50,000 programmes, recorded off-

air from 20 channels inc. BBC, Al-Jazeera, Russia

Today, CNN, CCTV (China), NHK, Bloomberg, France

24, World Service, LBC

40 hours of TV and 22 hours of radio captured per day

Born digital archive, including Electronic Programme

Guide data and subtitles where available

Access onsite only, owing to copyright restrictions, via

Broadcast News service

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Web news

Non-print legal deposit legislation introduced in April

2013 means British Library can start harvesting UK

websites

First annual crawl collected 4.5M .uk websites and web

pages

Harvesting c.500 UK news websites (mostly

newspapers) on daily/weekly basis, from end of 2013

Targeting of particular news events e.g. death of Nelson

Mandela

Access onsite only at BL and other legal deposit libraries

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The Newsroom

New reading room for news, opened at St Pancras

April 2014

Reading room with networking annexe

Provides access to newspapers (digital, microfilm and

print), television, radio and Web news

Digital microfilm readers

Electronic resources

Access to print newspapers only where a ‘surrogate’

copy (digital or microfilm) does not exist. Delivery of

print newspapers will take 48 hours and begins in

Autumn 2014

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The Newsroom

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News for the future

More digitisation (40M pages by 2020)

More digital intake (target of 25% of new content in

digital form by 2017)

More multimedia news

More cross-linkages across different news media

A broader concept of ‘news’

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Email: luke.mckernan@bl.uk

Twitter: @BL_newsroom

Web: http://bl.uk/subjects/news-media

Blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/thenewsroom