Millions of newspaper pages will be digitised and made available online for the first time, it was announced yesterday.

Online publisher brightsolid will digitise 40 million pages of the British Library's newspaper archive, which spans 300 years.

The 10-year project will save researchers from travelling to the newspaper library in Colindale, north London, to look at hard copies and microfilm.

It will also cut down on wear and tear on fragile items in the collection and help to preserve them.

The British Library's chief executive officer Lynne Brindley said: "Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail.

"Mass digitisation unlocks the riches of our newspaper collections by making them available online to users across the UK and around the world.

"By making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print.

"It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than travelling to a physical location."

The British Library's collection has around 750 million newspaper pages including 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles.

During the first two years of the project, brightsolid said a minimum of four million pages will be digitised.

Over the course of 10 years, the partnership aims to convert 40 million pages as the digitisation process becomes more efficient and as post-1900 content still in copyright is scanned after negotiation with rights holders.

The digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press and will focus on specific periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911 and key events and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement.

The digital form of the newspapers will be free to users on-site at the British Library, otherwise a charge will be levied.

A digital copy of the scanned material will also be deposited in the library to be held in the national collection.

Brightsolid is taking on the commercial and technical risks of the project, so there are no direct costs for the British Library.

Chris van der Kuyl, of brightsolid, said: "We're delighted to be working with the British Library on such an exciting project.

"Digitisation will mean that those people who haven't previously been able to access the physical resource will now be able to access it from anywhere at any time.

"It will also offer a unique insight into major events and key periods of historical interest."

The company, a subsidiary of Dundee-based publisher DC Thomson, also operates the 1901 and 1911 census sites in partnership with The National Archives.

The British Library is moving the hard-copy collections from Colindale to be stored in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire.

From 2012, the collection can be accessed via microfilm and digital copies at the library's main site at St Pancras.

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