19th century newspapers go digital

One million pages of text from 19th century publications went online last night as part of a British Library project to digitise its journals.

The British Library Newspapers website, launched in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), contains searchable text from 46 regional newspapers from around the UK, dating back to 1800.

The online digital archive will be available free to lecturers and students in higher and further education institutions and to British Library visitors with reader passes, who can access it from the library's reading rooms in London's Kings Cross.

The launch will allow students and academics to examine how all the major events of that period were reported around Britain. Researchers can discover how the Whitechapel murders were covered in the Birmingham Daily Post, how the Battle of Trafalgar was captured in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post and how the Belfast News Letter reported the scramble for west Africa.

The website, developed by Gale/Cengage Learning - the world's largest publisher of reference databases and digital collections - over the past three years, will allow users to search through material previously only available in hard-copy form or through microform or CD-Roms in the library archive in Colindale, north London.

The journals available online have been chosen by a team of experts and academics, and include regional publications from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and specialist titles covering, for example, Victorian radicalism and Chartism.

Launching the archive last night, Sir Colin Lucas, chairman of the British Library, said: "Traditionally, access to these newspapers has meant you get a newspaper on to a desk and turn each page, which can be laborious and has the risk you may miss something. If you are an old historian like me, that's the great pleasure in it. But nowadays, people need the kind of search engine that will throw up 150,000 references to steam ships."

He added that a major reason for digitising the archive was to find a long-term way of preserving journals.

"Research by UK communities relies on access to the very best publications and information sources for its survival. The creation of the 19th century British Library Newspapers website ... has created a vital online research tool providing the very best resources for the UK's higher and further education communities," he said.

The initial one million pages, funded by £1m from the JISC, is the first phase of the library's digital archive project. More pages from the 19th century journals will be added over the coming months. The library also has plans to digitise 18th and 17th century publications, and has secured an additional £1m from JISC to help cover costs.

The launch of the newspaper website comes a year after the library unveiled its online sound archive, which contains 4,000 hours of recordings.