British Newspapers 1620-1900

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Grant Holder:
Project start date: 2007-07 Project end date: 2009-03
The goal of the British Newspapers 1620-1900 project was to make available on the web a digitised collection of British newspapers that spans all regions of the British Isles and is representative of newspapers published between 1620 and 1900. The intention was to deliver at least a further one million pages of digitised texts and load them to the Gale Cengage Learning website, and increase the content to four million pages of searchable text for pre 1900 newspapers. That goal has been exceeded by 157,349 pages. The newspapers were selected using the following criteria: *UK wide coverage *Century wide coverage *Out of copyright/not incorporated *Complete runs *Mix of regional and truly local newspapers *Inclusion of conservative press opinion via two important London papers (The Standard, Morning Post) The British Library has already digitised two separate collections of newspapers: British newspapers 1800-1900 and the Burney collection of British 18th century newspapers. This project deepens and widen the range of digitised content from both these earlier projects and bring them together to create a single, coherent and enriched resource which fully represents of the whole range of British newspapers from 1620-1900.
Project Website
Subject domains: 
English Language and Literature
Methods usedCategory
2d Scanning and photographyData capture
Resource sharingCommunication and collaboration
Content-based image retrievalData analysis
Image enhancementData structuring and enhancement
Image feature measurementData analysis
Image segmentationData analysis
Risk managementStrategy and project management
Text recognitionData capture
Textual interaction (asynchronous)Communication and collaboration
preservationStrategy and project management
textContent types
Funding sources: 
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Content types created: 
Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used: 
Omnipage, Scansoft
Source material used:  
The project's 1.1 million pages are taken from: * regional and local newspapers from the 19th (and some from the 18th) century * 19th century continuations of 18th century London newspapers in the Burney collection * specialist newspapers on themes of Reform and Politics, Religion, and Satire The primary focus, some 75% of the project, is on regional and local titles predominantly from the 19th century but also including some 18th century titles. This completes the geographic coverage of areas that were under-represented in the earlier projects.
Digital resource created:  
Pages of newspapers are microfilmed in-house (or copied from existing microfilms) then digitised, divided into articles and OCR-scanned in order to extract the text contents. The resulting images and XML data are added to a website already being planned for the Burney and JISC Phase 1 projects, to be hosted by a commercial partner.
Data Formats created: 
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Extensible Markup Language (XML), JPEG 2000, HTML, TIFF
Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination, Generation of HTML files from XML data for web-delivery
Metadata standards employed: 
Dublin Core, simple (DC), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), NISO Metadata for Images in XML (MIX), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)

Institutions affiliated with this project: 

UK HE institutions involved:
The British Library
Gale Cengage Learning
Content Conversion Specialists (CCS)

Project staff and expertise: 

Principal staff member:Jane Shaw, Patrick Fleming
Other staff:
External expertise:


Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record
Author(s) of recordValentina Asciutti
TitleBritish Newspapers 1620-1900
Record created2010-03-30
Record updated2010-04-21 16:24
URL of recordhttp://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2682
Citation of recordValentina Asciutti: British Newspapers 1620-1900.
<http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2682>
created: 2010-03-30, last updated 2010-04-21 16:24