Newspapers
The British Library Newspapers section is based in Colindale in North London. The Library has an almost complete collection of British and Irish newspapers since 1840. This is partly because of the legal deposit legislation of 1869, which required newspapers to supply a copy of each edition of a newspaper to the library. London editions of national daily and Sunday newspapers are complete back to 1801. In total the collection consists of 660,000 bound volumes and 370,000 reels of microfilm containing tens of millions of newspapers with 52,000 titles on 45 km of shelves. In May 2010 a ten year programme of digitisation of the newspaper archives with commercial partner DC Thomson subsidiary brightsolid began. In November 2011, BBC News announced the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, an initiative to facilitate online access to over one million pages of pre-20th century newspapers.
Among the collections are the Thomason Tracts, containing 7,200 17th century newspapers, and the Burney Collection, featuring nearly 1 million pages of newspapers from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The Thomason Tracts and Burney collections are held at St Pancras, and are available in digital facsimile.
The section also has extensive records of non-British newspapers in languages that use the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The Library's substantial holdings of newspapers in the languages of Asia and the Middle East may be accessed at the Library's reading rooms at St. Pancras.
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Famous quotes containing the word newspapers:
“When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that’s news. If they aren’t, that’s news too.”
—Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982)
“I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer “Yes, but I did it for the money” satisfy all but the most tiresome objections.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)