23 October 2015

British Newspaper Archive now with 12 million pages

A landmark is recognised as the British Newspaper Archive passes 12 million pages digitized from 526 titles.

This is a huge resource for British genealogists. Kudos to the British Library for their foresight in initiating the project, as well as conserving the newspapers over decades and centuries, and to their operational partner Findmypast.

Best coverage is for London-based newspapers, as would be expected.

Weighted by population the five English counties with top coverage are: Bristol, followed by Gloucestershire, Devon, East Riding of Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear. The five least well served on a population weighted basis, less than one tenth that of the top, are: Essex, Norfolk, Dorset, Surrey and with the poorest coverage, Hertfordshire.

Wales is less well covered, understandably given the 1.1 million page free digitized newspaper resource provided by the National Library of Wales.

Scotland, headquarters of the company is the best served of the counties per capita. Population data are not available on the same basis as the newspaper county categories although Angus with nearly eight times the coverage per capita of any English county appears best served. Midlothian, Aberdeenshire and Stirlingshire are not far behind.

For Northern Ireland Antrim, Fermanagh and Londonderry and for the Republic Waterford, Dublin, Tipperary and Wexford have best per capita coverage equivalent to the best English counties.




2 comments:

History Man said...

Actually London is very poorly covered in the British Newspaper Archives. The best coverage seems to be for the West of England and the English East Midlands.

JDR said...

It would appear History Man is using a different definition regarding English coverage than I am. According to the listing at the BNA there are 196,403 issues for London newspapers. That's followed by West Yorkshire (86,101), Devon (63,451), Gloucestershire (56,340) and Tyne and Weir (50.934).
On a per capita basis London is well down the list. The top counties are Bristol (89), Gloucestershire (64), Devon (55), East Riding of Yorkshire (51) and Tyne and Weir (46). The numbers are issues per thousand population.