Newspapers In The Historical Library

In recent years, cultural institutions and commercial providers have created extensive digitised newspaper collections. This book asks the timely question: what can the large-scale digitisation of newspapers tell us about the wider cultural phenomenon of mass digitisation? The unique form and materiality of newspapers, and their grounding in a particular time and place, provide challenges for researchers and digital resource creators alike. At the same time, the wider context in which digitisation of cultural heritage occurs shapes the impact of digital resources in ways which fall short of the grand ambitions of the wider theoretical discourse. Drawing on case studies from leading digitised newspaper collections, the book aims to provide a bridge between the theory and practice of how these digitised collections are being used. Beginning with an exploration of the hyperbolic nature of technological discourses, the author explores how web interfaces, funding models and the realities of contemporary user behaviour contrast with the hyperbolic discourse surrounding mass digitisation. This book will be of particular interest to those who want to investigate how user studies can inform our understanding of technological phenomena, including digital resource creators, information professionals, students and researchers in universities, libraries, museums and archives.

This book, first published in 1988, discusses the use and handling of newspapers in libraries and information centres. Although newspapers are recognized as an important source of information about current history and local events, they have been largely ignored by information specialists. Individuals who work with newspapers on a daily basis - as tools in research or as an ingredient in a larger process - have contributed valuable chapters on bibliographical and physical control of newspapers, working with newspapers in a variety of settings, and international, educational, and technical aspects of using and handling newspapers.

Thanks to digitisation, newspapers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century have become an indispensable and accessible source for researchers. Through their pages, historians with a passion for a person or a place or a time or a topic can rediscover forgotten details and gain new insights into the society and values of bygone ages.Historical Research Using British Newspapers provides plenty of practical advice for anyone intending to use old newspapers by: * outlining the strengths of newspapers as source material * revealing the drawbacks of newspapers as sources and giving ways to guard against them * tracing the development of the British newspaper industry * showing the type of information that can be found in newspapers and how it can be used * identifying the best newspapers to start with when researching a particular topic * suggesting methods to locate the most relevant articles available * demonstrating techniques for collating, analysing and interpreting information * showing how to place newspaper reports in their wider contextIn addition nine case studies are included, showing how researchers have already made productive use of newspapers to gain insights that were not available from elsewhere.