Newspaper digitisation:The British Library business model

Patrick Fleming

Head of Business Change, St Pancras Campus

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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

The British Library Newspaper Programme: Long term storage, preservation and access

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Reasons for the Newspaper ProgrammePreserve 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.)

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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

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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

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British Newspaper Archive

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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

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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

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Newsroom

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Newsroom networking

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