They are the first draft of history but, as many researchers would admit, are often overlooked. Historic newspapers, though, could enter the mindsets and research habits of academics with a bang, thanks to a new service from the British Library and technical partner Cengage Learning.

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), 19th Century British Library Newspapers is a digital archive that puts the national library’s Colindale collection onto the desktops of academia.

The incessant hunger to describe what is happening right in front of them puts journalists into a different category from historians. As a result, journalism has been ­ and still is ­ treated as a very different research resource.

Whereas citation provides a continuing context for older research papers, newspapers have typically ended their days as chip wrappers (for those old enough to remember such culinary traditions). Apart from a few archives maintained by newspaper companies and the British Library, they are usually rapidly discarded and seldom seen again.

Courtesy of JISC
The British Library has cleared these sizeable hurdles with its new website resource, 19th Century British Library Newspapers. The site will be free, thanks to the JISC money, to further and higher education.

The three partners in the venture have placed on the site content from various major national and regional newspapers, although not the daily papers that dominate the newsstands today. This service isn’t just a slice of 19th century history, but a slice of the history of news. Many of the titles on the site are no longer with us.

Each newspaper scan is an excellent facsimile of the original. Once discovered in a search they appear as a 33%-sized image, which gives the user an instant view of the whole newspaper page in question where the search term appears.

When you first wander into this archive you are instantly struck by how much newspapers have changed. There is a great debate in the navel-gazing media at the moment about the effects of tabloidised quality papers and the new free papers that line the gutters of London streets, but on this service you are looking at newspapers before the advent of radio, cinema, television and, of course, the internet. This means that the information conveyed is radically different to what you find in today’s papers. It’s not simply that you won’t find pages dominated by reality TV celebrities, but information that is today typically shared on email lists or through an automated service is here, painstakingly laid out in newsprint.

The cargo lists of steamers heading from Suffolk to London are written out in full for all to see, as are the itineraries of Queen Victoria in quite excruciating detail, merely to give society types of the day something to discuss. The learned societies whose journals are today the mainstay of the academic information industry have their meetings and paper readings written up in full reports.

Superior search
Search dominates the opening of the site. Although it is described as a basic search, it offers a number of options to create an advanced search. Right from the opening screen, you can narrow the search by document or keywords, dates and publication title.

The powerful search engine delivers results instantly and when you look at the number of results for a broader search, you get a strong picture of how quickly the engine works its way through the archive.

To test the power of the search, I looked for Clements Markham ­ a man who would eventually become president of the Royal Society of Geographers, but for large parts of the 19th century was just another civil servant at the India Office. The Cengage search engine was easily up to the task. Obviously, his later career was easier to find, but his attendance at meetings early in his career was also plucked from obscurity.

Results are delivered as a table. Each result is accompanied by a thumbnail of the page it comes from, with a red outline over the area of the image corresponding to the part of the page where the result appears. This thumbnail result locator is a useful tool, because 19th century newspapers contained a great many stories per page.

Right of the thumbnail is a listing of details about the result. Here you will find the article headline, the newspaper, details of the area where the newspaper was active, the date of the article and the issue number ­ there is even a word count for the article.

One really nice feature in the search results is a multiple page symbol when an article spreads across multiple pages. This is excellent attention to detail and usability.

Using the advanced search or the options in the basic search tool, you can drill down by selected newspapers and regions of the country, and adjust the fuzziness till you find what you want.

Results can also be altered to suit your preferences, with the tool categorising results from within a publication for you. For example, a search into how Queen Victoria was reported in the Ipswich Journal breaks the results down into examples of advertisements, arts articles, business stories, news and people stories. This level of granularity demonstrates an excellent knowledge of newspapers and a concerted attempt to make the database as powerful and usable as possible.
Colour newspaper pages are still relatively new, so you won’t be knocked out by a kaleidoscope of colour on the site. However, Cengage and the British Library have delivered what users want: an easily navigable service that is loaded with tools, but not confusing.

Tools when viewing a newspaper page include bookmarks, PDF downloads of the scans, an email function and a well-thought-out print capability that offers the options of a one-page portrait, half-page landscape and quarter-page portrait. Considering the unwieldy size of many old newspapers, this is a handy tool that lets you print off only the part of the page you want.

A zoom function can increase image size to 400%, which is ideal for viewing them. Some of the newspapers are made up entirely of images. You can also manipulate the scan on your screen, twisting it around as if you had the real paper on your desk. Best of all is a browse tool for flicking through the entire issue of that paper. All you need to get is a cup of Empire tea.

The happy newshound
As a journalist, I loved flipping through the acres of newsprint here, visiting the regions and seeing how the press of the time reacted. I was left astonished by how newspapers have changed. Construct some dynamic searches and before you know it you are reading a letter in the 31 January 1894 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette from novelist H Rider Haggard.

This service is not another talking shop for the Chardonnay-sipping media set. The site is aimed squarely at the academic and student user, although anyone with a interest in history will enjoy the Grub Street appeal.

The historian in everyone will enjoy the revelations of a century that changed Britain utterly ­ from the Battle of Trafalgar to the Boer War.

Despite the whirlwind of change, I also revelled in discovering how some things never seem to change. In a search of how cycling was reported I read how cyclists were considered a danger and that cycling itself would cause irrevocable damage to its participants. Then as I left the office later that morning, I saw the anti-cycling headline in that day’s Evening Standard. Who says yesterday’s news is worthless?