British Newspapers 1620-1900

The goal of the British Newspapers 1620-1900 project was to make available on the web a digitised collection of British newspapers that spans all regions of the British Isles and is representative of newspapers published between 1620 and 1900. The intention was to deliver at least a further one million pages of digitised texts and load them to the Gale Cengage Learning website, and increase the content to four million pages of searchable text for pre 1900 newspapers. That goal has been exceeded by 157,349 pages.

The newspapers were selected using the following criteria:
*UK wide coverage
*Century wide coverage
*Out of copyright/not incorporated
*Complete runs
*Mix of regional and truly local newspapers
*Inclusion of conservative press opinion via two important London papers (The Standard, Morning Post)

The British Library has already digitised two separate collections of newspapers: British newspapers 1800-1900 and the Burney collection of British 18th century newspapers. This project deepens and widen the range of digitised content from both these earlier projects and bring them together to create a single, coherent and enriched resource which fully represents of the whole range of British newspapers from 1620-1900.