This talk was given by Luke McKernan (The British Library) at the "Semantic Media @ The British Library" event on 23 September 2013.

1. News collections at the
British Library
Luke McKernan
Lead Curator, News and Moving Image
Semantic Media @ British Library

2. www.bl.uk 2
News at the British Library

3. www.bl.uk 3
News at the British Library

4. www.bl.uk 4
Newspapers
 57,000 separate newspaper, journal, and periodical
titles: approximately 100M issues or 750 individual
pages, from 16thC to today, on print and microfilm
 Occupies 50km shelf space
 Current acquisition: 1,934 newspaper and
weekly/fortnightly periodical titles
 Print copies acquired under legal deposit but will move
increasingly towards digital acquisition
 Physical access at Newspaper Library, Colindale,
closing in November 2013 – new reading room at St
Pancras early 2014
 Online access to 7M pages via British Newspaper
Archive

5. www.bl.uk 5
British Newspaper Archive
http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

6. www.bl.uk 6
Television and radio news
 Began recording television and radio news programmes
receivable in the UK in May 2010
 Collection now over 30,000 programmes, of which
25,000 are TV, recorded off-air from 20 channels inc.
BBC, Al-Jazeera, Russia Today, CNN, CCTV (China),
NHK, Bloomberg, France 24, World Service, LBC
 40 hours of TV and 22 hours of radio now captured per
day
 Born digital archive, including Electronic Programme
Guide data and subtitles where available
 Access onsite only, owing to copyright restrictions, via
Broadcast News service

7. www.bl.uk 7
Broadcast News
http://videoserver.bl.uk (onsite only)

8. www.bl.uk 8
Web news
 Non-print legal deposit legislation introduced in April 2013
means British Library can start harvesting UK websites
 First annual crawl will collect 4.5M .uk websites and web
pages
 Plans to harvest a few hundred UK news websites on
daily basis, beginning later this year
 Access onsite only at BL and other legal deposit libraries
 More information:
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/webarch/index.
html

9. www.bl.uk 9
Available digital content
 Underlying data (XML) for 2M nineteenth century
newspaper pages, including
 Publication date
 Newspaper title
 Issue
 Uncorrected OCR text
 Underlying data (XML) for 30,000 television and radio
programmes, including
 Transmission date
 Programme title
 Channel
 Subtitles (where available)
 Possible use of audio and video content onsite
 Web news content not available as yet

10. www.bl.uk 10
How can we bring the different
news media together?
 Searching Speech
 PoliMedia
 Newsmap
 I Wanted to See All of the News from Today
 Guardian Data Blog

11. www.bl.uk 11
Searching Speech
http://britishlibrary.greenbutton.com (onsite only)

12. www.bl.uk 12
PoliMedia
http://polimedia.nl

13. www.bl.uk 13
Newsmap
http://newsmap.jp

14. www.bl.uk 14
I Wanted to See All of the News from Today
http://allnews.greyisgood.eu

15. www.bl.uk 15
Guardian Data Blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/may/16/
bitly-news-map-britain-data

16. Thank you
luke.mckernan@bl.uk
Semantic Media @ British Library