Historical British newspapers online

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to show how early newspapers have become ever more essential sources for the study of “history from below”.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper looks at why back runs of newspapers are an unrivalled primary source for students, authors, and researchers.

Findings

Historians of all kinds now have access to a much expanded range of newspaper titles. The complete run of The Economist has been completed; the newspaper digitisation programme of the British Library has already recovered over three million pages from hundreds of titles from the restoration to the end of the nineteenth century. More than a million pages of the Guardian/Observer files are now appearing online, and the complete edition of The Illustrated London News will be published in the spring of 2009.

Originality/value

The paper describes the modern technology advances have made possible the creation of this great corpus of historical newspapers.

Citation

Holland, M. (2008), "Historical British newspapers online", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 25 No. 7, pp. 18-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050810921319