We’ve recently started to offer people a glimpse of what the newspaper archive contains, by uploading some content to our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/TheBritishNewspaperArchive  As the archive is likely to appeal to a large number of different audiences, we’re striving to choose content that will appeal to these different audiences. Our Facebook page already includes stories and illustrations on a number of different subjects – ranging from terrific images of the Great Exhibition of 1851 to assassination attempts on Queen …

With a target of 4.25 million newspaper pages to reach for the launch in late 2011, the Stakhanov-like workers (up to 8,000 newspaper pages a day are being digitised) who are doing the scanning at the British Library’s Colindale site, continue to find articles of great interest and quirkiness. In short, ‘all human life is here’: from a man who decided one day to walk round the world in an iron mask, to bullet-stopping corsets and the art of wide-sleeved …