Newspapers in Europe and the Digital Agenda for Europe

1. Newspaper digitisation:
The British Library business
model
Patrick Fleming
Head of Business Change, St Pancras Campus

2. The British Library Newspaper Programme: Long term
storage, preservation and access
750 million newspaper pages in the
collection
600,000 bound volumes, wrapped
parcels and boxes of Newspapers,
150,000 periodicals
Surrogates: Approx 35% microfilm
Less than 1% digital
50 km of shelf space at Colindale
Physical collections growing at up to
450m p.a. through Legal Deposit
www.bl.uk 2

3. Reasons for the Newspaper Programme
Preserve fragile newspapers
 Create a preservation storage environment
(the Newspaper Storage Building) at Boston
Spa in Yorkshire and move the Newspapers to
it
Improve user experience and access
 Integrate service provision with St Pancras
Reading Rooms
 Create new search and ordering interface and
comprehensive online catalogue data
 Provide a compelling digital content offering
Create growth space for print newspapers
 Allow growth space for hard copy Newspapers
(growing at up to 450m p.a.)
www.bl.uk 3

4. The drive to digital:
• Driven by need to transform approach to existing physical and
microfilm access
• Need to stop microfilming
• Digital desire: Core problem: No funding
• 2007 to 2009: £3m from JISC to digitise three million pages
• Core principle: Free at the British Library accessible via
Cengage institutional platform: effectively a solution for higher
education and international libraries
• Library needed an accelerator
www.bl.uk 4

5. The British Newspaper Archive
• Competitive Dialogue procurement to find a partner to digitise from the
archive at no cost to the Library
• May 2010 launched the British Newspaper Archive with brightsolid (now DC
Thomson Family History) with commitment to digitise up to 40 million pages
over next decade
• brightsolid created scanning facility at Colindale now Boston Spa
• Business model: brightsolid scan out of copyright content (pre 1900) from
Library hard copy and microfilm collection and provide free access on Library
premises and sell through B2C micropayment site
• brightsolid able to work with publishers to ‘acquire’ content especially 1900 to
1950
• brightsolid return all content with OCR and metadata to the Library
www.bl.uk 5

6. British Newspaper Archive
www.bl.uk 6

7. Outcomes
• JISC content embedded in the BNA
• DC Thomson create partnership with Cengage Learning to reach
institutional and B2B market
• DC Thomson create partnership with Newsplan to digitise from their
archive
• DC Thomson embed content in their genealogy brand Find My Past
taking Library content into new markets
• DC Thomson create successful new business
• British Library gets revenue share, wider access to content and ability
to introduce surrogate first strategy for future collection access
• Newspaper publishers get newspaper content digitised
www.bl.uk 7

8. From Newspapers to Newsroom
 Newspapers
 Print and microfilm newspapers –
60M issues, one third accessible in
surrogate form
 Digitised newspapers – British
Newspaper Archive – 8.7M digitised
pages
 Electronic newspaper resources –
national and international sources
 Television & radio
 Broadcast News – 22 channels, 60
hours per day, 40,000 programmes
since May 2010
 BBC catalogue – 2M catalogue
records plus BBC TV and radio since
2007
 Web
 Legal deposit – annual crawl
 Legal deposit – 500+ news sites
archived on daily/weekly basis
 UK Web Archive
www.bl.uk 8

9. Newsroom
www.bl.uk 9

10. Newsroom networking
www.bl.uk 10

11. www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25041871
www.bl.uk 11