The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
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The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
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Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#2> The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication.
It's depressing that copyright has been extended so far it's now longer then any single individual's possible lifetime.
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#3Nobody cares
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#4> The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication. It's depressing that copyright has been extended so far it's now longer then any single individual's possible lifetime.
Wasn't it Disney and other media companies that pushed copyright duration towards this 140 year value? I vaguely recall that as a driving factor though maybe wrong and one of those unproven theories or meme'd news of times past.
Be ironic (A children focused company like Disney pushing thru a change in law that actually in the end harms the children as it limits their access for their lifetime into copyright servitude that shows little thought for the children) if was as would sure add a whole new spin to the "think of the children" sound-bite often used to push thru some change in law/rules.
Still, somewhat sad. More so as we build building today too a standard that is not that long-standing in years by design.
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#5> The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication. It's depressing that copyright has been extended so far it's now longer then any single individual's possible lifetime.
The National library of Sweden has a similar website but for newspapers printed in Sweden. They write "Copyright protection is valid for 115 years on the day. The free material is moved forward by one day every day." I get that likes such as Disney has an interest in extending it. Maybe a middle ground could be the ability to apply for extensions of individual works instead of a universal blanket extension? This long period really hampers my ability to do research on 1700s literature - a lot of such research was done in the early 1900s. But that content, even if it's 100 years old, just isn't indexed anywhere (e.g. Google books) due to copyright even if it is already digitized.
https://tidningar.kb.se
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#6> The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication. It's depressing that copyright has been extended so far it's now longer then any single individual's possible lifetime.
Wasn't it Disney and other media companies that pushed copyright duration towards this 140 year value? I vaguely recall that as a driving factor though maybe wrong and one of those unproven theories or meme'd news of times past. Be ironic (A children focused company like Disney pushing thru a change in law that actually in the end harms the children as it limits their access for their lifetime into copyright servitud…
AFAIK the 140 year is just an arbitary value the British Library have used, it isn't part of copyright law. The UK has used a life + X[1] years system since the 1840s[2]. I guess they assume 140 years is enough to ensure any unknown / untracable authors have been dead for long enough for a work to be near unquestionably in the public domain.
[1] Where X has steadily increased with each copyright law revision.
[2] The US was a weird outlier on this for a long time after most of the world settled on this system.
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#7Interesting facts about the British Library:
- It requires every physical book published in the UK to be collected by the Library (since 1662)
- It has 60 million individual newspaper editions
- In 1999, the Library earmarked 60,000 volumes of non-British newspapers for disposal because it was running out of storage space (inviting criticism)
- The newspapers were offered to overseas museums, or put up for auction. But the short notice given to museums meant many were unable to accept them (they also needed time to free up physical space)
- The American writer Nicholson Baker used his own retirement money to purchase "2000 bound volumes of American newspapers - the last remaining copies in the world - including a complete run of the Chicago Tribune from 1888 to 1958 and hundreds of editions of Joseph Pulitzer's ground-breaking colour broadsheet of the 1890s, the New York World." [1]
- The physical copies of the American newspapers were saved and become part of the American Newspaper Repository [2] a non-profit organisation which Baker founded. In 2004, the collection moved to Duke University.
- Baker went on to publish a book of the whole affair in 2001 called Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. The Guardian published an interview with him in 2002 (below)
[1] Paper Chase: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/22/museums.re...
[2] From an archived copy of the American Newspaper Repository website: "Research libraries everywhere, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Research Libraries, have replaced most of their often richly illustrated sets of late 19th and 20th century newspapers with black and white microfilm."
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#8Direct link to the site:
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#9Interesting facts about the British Library: - It requires every physical book published in the UK to be collected by the Library (since 1662) - It has 60 million individual newspaper editions - In 1999, the Library earmarked 60,000 volumes of non-British newspapers for disposal because it was running out of storage space (inviting criticism) - The newspapers were offered to overseas museums, or put up for auction. B…
> It requires every physical book published in the UK to be collected by the Library
Legal deposit is more the rule than exception for national libraries. Many national libraries are also saving copies of the national relevant web.
Re: The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
#10This is great. Historical newspapers are one of the largest corpora of information that has yet to be adequately brought on line.
In the U.S. the Library of Congress has digitized a fair number, but at the state and local level it's really hit or miss. Some states such as California and New York have put quite a bit on line, but many others rely on individual towns and historical societies.
Different pay services cover various papers, but there has never been concerted effort to digitize the staggering amount of microfilm that is out there.