The British Newspaper Archive added over 200,000 pages in February, bringing the current grand total to over 7.5 million. There’s still plenty more to be scanned, so we’ve already started chasing the next milestone – 8 million pages!
50 titles have been updated this month, including the Durham County Advertiser, the Wiltshire Independent and the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. A full list of recent additions is provided below.
Newspapers added to The British Newspaper Archive in February
Aberdeen Journal – 1878, 1882, 1883
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette – 1769, 1870, 1889, 1925
Belfast Morning News – 1858
Birmingham Daily Mail, The – 1837, 1884, 1900
Birmingham Daily Post – 1888
Birmingham Gazette – 1880
Burnley Express – 1908, 1911, 1934, 1935
Burnley Gazette – 1889
Burnley News, The – 1924, 1932
Cheltenham Chronicle – 1873, 1885, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892
Cheltenham Looker-On – 1843
Coventry Herald – 1885, 1916
Coventry Standard – 1856
Daily Herald, The – 1914
Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald – 1911
Dover Express – 1892, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1900
Dublin Evening Mail – 1824, 1826
Dumfries and Galloway Standard – 1875, 1892
Dundee, Perth, and Cupar Advertiser – 1859
Durham County Advertiser, The – 1817, 1818, 1820, 1821, 1824, 1827, 1828, 1829, 1834, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1842, 1843, 1845, 1846, 1848
Edinburgh Evening News – 1905, 1906, 1911, 1932
Evening Telegraph – 1885, 1887, 1891, 1896, 1904
Falkirk Herald – 1869
Fife Herald – 1875, 1876, 1877
Gloucester Citizen – 1931, 1937
Gloucester Journal – 1794, 1797, 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802
Lancaster Gazette – 1861
Leamington Spa Courier – 1838, 1839
Liverpool Daily Post – 1906
Maidstone Telegraph – 1861
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser – 1898
Newcastle Journal – 1875, 1884, 1885
North & South Shields Gazette and Northumberland and Durham Advertiser – 1872, 1873
Nottingham Evening Post – 1910, 1939
Reading Mercury – 1873
Sheffield Evening Telegraph – 1898
Southern Reporter – 1887, 1888, 1889, 1891
Sports Argus, The – 1914
Staffordshire Sentinel – 1897
Stamford Mercury – 1911
Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette – 1908, 1909
Sussex Agricultural Express, The – 1898, 1899, 1902, 1914, 1954
Swindon Advertiser and North Wilts Chronicle – 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867
Taunton Courier, and Western Advertiser – 1840
Wells Journal – 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1895
Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald – 1916, 1917, 1918
Wiltshire Independent – 1841, 1843, 1844, 1846, 1847, 1848, 1849, 1857, 1859, 1860, 1861
Yorkshire Evening Post – 1910, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1954
Yorkshire Gazette – 1859
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, The – 1866, 1871, 1883, 1887, 1890, 1891, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1901, 1902, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1913, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1924, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1938, 1939
35 comments On 7.5 million newspaper pages now online
Total pages quoted 29-11-12 was 6,000,000
Total pages quoted 21-06-13 was 6,913,016
Total
pages quoted 13-03-14 was 7,558,179
That’s
just a miserly 645,163 pages in the last 9 months! That is less than 72,000
pages a month ;(
Hi Gaz, thanks very much for your feedback.
We’re currently optimising the digitisation process, making gradual improvements to the way newspapers are loaded onto the website.
Our immediate focus is on the quality of the digitisation, followed by a focus on the quantity of newspapers being loaded.
Zzzzz, so you never tire of telling us with your lame &
fluffy excuses for failing to deliver the advertized service month after month. However, your paying customers are more
interested in you currently optimising
the integrity of your subscription process, making immediate
improvements to the way your admitted backlog of over 1 million scanned newspapers are loaded onto the website. Your immediate focus should be on honouring the quality of the customer
service advertized, followed by a focus
on a 4-month subscription extension for the quantity of newspapers not being loaded in 2013.
What is the point of having a survey if you have already failed
to act on the 146 replies to the tech upgrade update? The blog responses have been conveniently
knobbled for long enough to halt & bury the justified subscriber criticism
in that thread.
The only drumroll I want to hear is for the dismissal of BNA
management if you continue to fail so miserably. Fraudulent advertizing, failure to provide an
adequate service and a PR disaster…….rip off Britain at its very worst! It really is shameful and embarrassing to be
British these days. Enough of the smarmy
self-praise, worthless management-speak & dodgy statistics. Kindly stop cherry-picking the customer
comments you deign to reply to, answer every point & do what customers tell
you to do. Yes, that includes refunding
or extending our wasted subscriptions!
No disrespect to Dr Boon
Low,
but the difference between 1.6 and 0.6 seconds is irrelevant and BNA management
should have tasked him with drastically improving the quality of the abysmal
search results instead.
“As
always, we have an excellent pipeline of new content on the way. We’re currently reviewing our plans
for 2014.” (Ian, BNA’s Pinocchio?
December 28th, 2013) Cough, cough! What could possibly rival The Sussex Agricultural Express?
Is The Llareggub Times coming soon? It’s
March 14 already & more than a little bit late to still be reviewing your
plans for 2014!
Thanks for your comments, Gaz. We’ll pass them on for you.
We are currently running a normal level backlog and are continuing to increase the number of pages that we publish. The number of pages will fluctuate from time to time, but we remain committed to our goal of 40 million pages over 10 years.
We’re quite happy to share our 2014 plans too. These include adding more newspapers from the First World War period, continuing to add more from across the country for the period 1710-1950 and increasing coverage for the Greater London area, Ireland and Wales.
It would be useful if you could put up a list of titles (and runs within titles) you intend to upload next, just to give us researchers an idea of what to expect – it would certainly make planning easier.
Hi Colin, while we’re not able to tell you precisely what will be added at what time, we will be introducing some information about what our digitisation team is working on in their monthly ‘behind the scenes’ blog posts.
Recently Added Issues currently lists:
Birmingham Gazette 1914 – 1916
yet the only the 1915 issues are available, but no 1914 or 1916 editions.
Are you planning a complete WW1 run of this title? Are other WW1 issues imminent?
Thankyou
Hi Kitty, you can search copies of the Birmingham Gazette from 1914, 1915, 1916 and 1917: http://bit.ly/1gXHlzv
We’ll be adding more newspapers from the First World War period over the next few months too.
There are 8 annual volumes on today’s list of the last 30 days’ additions. That doesn’t really add up. With 200000 pages added the last month, that would mean those eight volumes consisted of papers with 80 pages six days a week. how is that?
And why can’t you list the additions in chronological order ather than alphabetical? No matter if the pages add up or not, it will be a lot easier to see which new papers you are adding.
Thank you very much for pointing that out. It looks like we may have a bug on the page as it should certainly be displaying more additions than it currently is. We’ve reported it to our technical team.
Chronological is an interesting suggestion too. We currently display the titles alphabetically for ease of reference, but would consider altering this if the majority of our customers would prefer a chronological list. If any other customers are reading this and agree, please do let us know.
Thanks for responding so soon. wouldn’t it be possible to make a solution where the users could switch between alphabetical and chronological listing?
You’re very welcome, thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Everything is possible – we just have to weigh up where it’s best to focus our development time. We’ll pass your idea on to our team.
I for one love this site, and have found many, many anecdotal stories of my ancestors, giving an insight into their lives and characters that simply can’t be found on registration documents. I find the search very easy to use too.
I would really love more suffolk and norfolk related pages to look through!
Thankyou for adding flesh to my rellie’s bones.
Thank you very much for your kind comments, Freya. We hope you continue to enjoy using the website.
Hi just wondered if and when you will be adding the Brierley Hill advertiser and county Express (Stourbridge) to the archive.
Hi Steve, they’re not on the current scanning list, but we’ll pass the request on for you.
Your list Newspapers added to The British Newspaper Archive in February is extremely interesting but is more tantalising than helpful to me in my own use of the BNA. As a regular searcher for two specific phrases only–and being in the midst of viewing the thousands which seem to be of interest–there seems to be no way (unless I have missed it) of searching for my phrases in these new items alone. In other words, I have not found a way to search the additional newspapers without bringing up all the entries that I have already found, except by using an impossibly large number of searches filtered by individual newspaper date.
Would it not be possible–and, in practice probably quite easy–to add a new filter to the existing series which would allow a search to be made on all papers added to the database in that particular month. Even returning from extended absences, it would be easy to separately run through two or three months to catch up.
I, and possibly many others, would then be able each month, to search just those newspapers added the previous month.
Please!
Or have I missed something obvious?
This is a good idea. How about it BNA?
Thank you for the suggestion, Malcolm. This is actually something we’re very keen to introduce on The British Newspaper Archive, so watch this space!
I’d like to see all the late 19th and early 20th century sporting papers added
Thanks for your comment, Kevin. We’ll pass it on to our team for you.
How does it work in terms of updating titles? For example, the paper I’m interested in-the Bury Times-has not been updated at all since it was originally added. I’m beginning to lose all hope that it ever will!
Hi Tyson, we’ve tried to provide coverage for as much of the UK and Ireland as possible to begin with and will then return to add more depth to this. There’s a lot more still to come – our aim is to add 40 million newspaper pages over 10 years.
Is there any reason why the Kentish Gazette for 1772 is missing?
Hi Jan, newspaper years are loaded as soon as they are ready for publication. As some newspapers require more attention than others, it can often mean that years are not added sequentially.
For instance, 1935 may be ready to upload before 1934 or 1936 if those papers require any extra work.
Many thanks for the reply. Hopefully it will come in time.
Is there any schedule for adding titles from Folkestone? I would particularly love to see the Folkestone News here.
Thanks for the suggestion, Jan. We’ll pass it on to our team for you.
Thank you. Thankfully, the local library has many of the other titles published for Folkestone, but the Folkestone News they only have for 3 years. It wasn`t a long running newspaper, but it`s possibly the most interesting of the Folkestone titles.
What is the situation with the backlog accumulated during last year’s ingest problem? http://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2013/07/17/more-content-more-quickly-the-bna-tech-upgrade-an-update/#comments
Has it been uploaded now?
Hi Kitty, we’ve been working through the backlog and should have it cleared in the next couple of months. We’ve been scanning new items too, so there’s plenty of new material to come as well.
Plus as far as being “really keen” to add this feature – what were you thinking when you went live with the site without it? Crazy, given the number of pages you intended to upload. Again, as I suggested previously, please make the “recently added search” ability variable and not a fixed period of 1 month. What do we want – Flexibility. When do we want it: NOW!
Thanks for your comments, Paul. Rest assured, we plan to make it much easier for you to find articles in recently added newspapers this year.
amazing!!! keep up the best work!!
Thanks for sharing such post.