An amazing project has just gone live in the UK - Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th Centuries have been made available online by the British Library.
Most of the newspapers printed from 1800 can now be searched and accessed online. Whether for nostalgia or for research into the past this is a fantastic feat to bring dormant, hard to access information into the modern information age.
The public can now scan the content of 200 titles from around Britain and Ireland. Local events and individual knowledge will be a tremendous resource but also with the power of hindsight, you can look at events unfolding at the time and how the events unfolded.
It would be interesting to see how the search ability and visualisations will be completed by the team. Having looked at this with our Information Access / Search experts it is difficult to traverse articles and find the details of the stories. One idea that was liked was enabling user tagging, i.e. user can tag and add details to the stories to add colour and context to the seemingly smaller stories to the larger context of events and vice versa.
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