Old Newspaper Stories from Previous Hogmanay and New Year‘s Days With time’s winged chariot parked half on the pavement and New Year‘s Day just about to knock on the door and first-foot us all, we thought it‘d be a good time to post some ’On this day‘ Hogmanay and Ne‘erday stories on our Facebook page. Abraham Lincoln‘s New Year Resolution of 1863 As the first of January is often a day for new legislation to arrive on the statute books, …

The Museum of London has just launched a free iPhone and iPad application, which takes users on an Orphean-like journey into the underworld of Dickensian London. To find out more about this amazing digital journey into the shady areas of Victorian London, visit the museum’s website: http://​www.museumoflondon.org.uk/​Resources/app/Dickens_webpage/​index.html  

With Christmas Day almost upon us, we’ve gathered together some Christmassy stories in a gallery on our Facebook page. This story gallery contains a real mix of Christmas tales: from eye-witness accounts of the Christmas Truce of 1914 (including thoughts on the football match in “no-man’s land”), to a very strange yarn about a burglar who was caught because a woman was so conscientious about cooking her Christmas pudding. There are also stories about Christmas ghosts, a lyrical Victorian eulogy …

We thought we’d try and spread some Christmas cheer by posting this link to the opening page of Dickens’s manuscript for ‘A Christmas Carol’. This digital image of page one has been created by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, working from the only manuscript that Dickens wrote for his classic Christmas tale. In particular, it’s worth clicking on the ‘Notes’ tab, since it offers some fascinating thoughts on the creative writing process. http://documents.nytimes.com/looking-over-the-shoulder-of-charles-dickens-the-man-who-wrote-of-a-christmas-carol

Christmas Stories from the British Newspaper Archive With Christmas Day nearly here, we thought we‘d gather together some Christmassy stories from the newspaper archive and post them on our Facebook page. The Christmas Truce of 1914 The first batch of stories in our Christmas gallery is newspaper reports of the impromptu truce that took place on the Western Front on Christmas Day 1914. These stories are fascinating and offer the reader a real sense of what a unique and surreal …

To complement the description by our web development team of how the British Newspaper Archive website works (refer to the previous post), you can also watch some short films of the scanning/digitisation team at work at the Colindale Library. To see these short films of the scanning/digitisation process, just visit our Youtube page: The British Newspaper Archive channel

Many people have been asking us about the technological wizardry behind the British Newspaper Archive website. If you want to know more about how the website works, visit the brightsolid blog at: http://www.brightsolid.com/online-technology/blog/how-we-launched-the-british-newspaper-archive-website-one-of-the-uks-largest-digitisation-projects.html