British Newspaper Archive
The British Newspaper Archive web site provides access to searchable digitized archives of British and Irish newspapers. It was launched in November 2011.
Owner
Subscription costs[edit]
While access within the British Library is free, online access is via a subscription system based on daily or item charges, £12.95 monthly or yearly fees of up to £79.95 as of July 2019. New visitors may access three free page views and explore hundreds of national, regional and local titles dating from the 1700s–2000s.[19]
As part of The Wikipedia Library, Brightsolid provided free one-year subscriptions to a limited number of experienced Wikipedia editors from July 2014.[20] The agreement was terminated in 2016 because "structural changes at their parent organisation(s) mean that there is no longer interest in continuing the partnership with The Wikipedia Library".
Reception[edit]
Reviews of the service have been mixed, with some early responses complimentary about the ability to access and search the large data sets.[21][15] However, there have been complaints of the excessive cost and the general policy of the British Library allowing a private company the rights to the newspapers.[22][23] One writer noted that: "The BNA demonstrates what happens to our cultural heritage when there is no political will for public investment. The nineteenth-century newspaper press was one of the period's greatest achievements but, rather than celebrate it, opening it up and giving it back to the nation, the British Library have been forced to sell it off."[24]
The search Interface has also been criticised for problems in identifying where the searched terms are on the retrieved pages, and in the unreliability of the web interface, with bugs preventing images loading and regular crashes.[25]