British Newspaper Archive

[GrahamSimons]

For coverage see here:

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/home/NewspaperTitles

[Sloe Gin]

Here's what the pdf looks like (saved as a jpg).  Try enlarging it and you'll see what I mean.

[Hammerman]

I'm a subscriber and I make the image fit the screen and then use the snipping tool to make a jpg. If a long article I cut and paste them together

[Sloe Gin]

Fantastic, thanks.  If we can do that now, there's no problem.  That solves my dilemma 

Clever of you to find the article of interest!  Thanks for taking the time.  The unfortunate lady was my gg grandmother 

[Sloe Gin]

For coverage see here:

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/home/NewspaperTitles

Thanks ..... but I see what Newburychap means now. 

It's only when you drill right down to specific years that you discover how much is missing.  For instance, for the Reading Mercury it says "1770-1903" - but I've gone into 1810-1819, only to find that all they have is part of 1811.

[Hammerman]

They are adding more every day but of course they still have a lot to do. It will take them years to complete.
I don't know what order they are scanning them in but it's never the newspapers we personally want! We'll have to be patience, it's easier then going to Colindale, Reading or wherever and looking through microfilms or bound volumes without indexes.
Went they first started nearly a year ago they were adding what I wanted by the hundred every month, now it's a handful every month even though there are big gaps in what they have issued.

[newburychap]

My only complaint is the huge gaps in the scanning of my local paper.

Have they started the NWN, or do you mean the Reading paper?

Sadly not - I was referring to the Reading Mercury (which was the local paper for 130 years before the NWN was founded in 1867).

Sadly there are very few complete decades of papers (only the 1790s, 1840s & 1860s). Some decades are barely covered at all - very frustrating if I am looking into an event from the 1810s where there are only 35 issues of the 520+ covering the whole decade. And there are no pre-1750 issues (it was founded in 1734).   Then they stopped digitising in 1903, and one of my interests is the war dead from WW1!

A huge shame because I have found hundreds of useful items in what they have put online, which has greatly assisted my research into local pubs and breweries.

I have wondered if the missing issues are due to image quality, it seems unlikely that they would only scan a few papers per year once they had the bound volume out and ready to process.  However, for some of the earlier years the image quality is far from great (legible but nothing like as good as the later years).  When they launched the site and I realised the Mercury was covered it seemed to be a real bonus, but I now wonder if the coverage suffers from it being scanned in the early days of the project and whether there would be a lot more of it available if it had gone through the process a few months later.

[Hammerman]

The way I understood it was when it was launched they had scanned some new volumes but they also scanned the previous microfilms. These obviously varied in quality as they were probably scanned years ago with perhaps less modern technology. A digital scan of a microfilm of a faded newspaper...

[newburychap]

They do indeed scan both film and originals - in the case of the Reading Mercury the earlier, 18th century issues are from film, but from 1789 they are new scans of the originals.  It is possible that they had to use the films of the early issues because the British Library don't have originals; I know some of their film was of originals held at Reading Library.

That said, scanning from film is a much quicker process (and hence much cheaper).  Scans from film are 300dpi greyscale (presumably 300dpi scaled to original size), from originals scans are 400dpi 24-bit colour. The uncompressed files can be enormous (some are 400Mb per page), too large to deliver from the site - I believe they massively overdid the compression of the pdfs in the early days. 

To be honest I don't download many pdfs (though they are perfectly readable) - only if the article is a large one.  For the typical paragraph or two I prefer the use a screen capture for a higher resolution image.