First look inside news ‘treasure trove’

WORK to bring one of the world’s largest newspaper collections to a new home in Yorkshire has entered its final phase.

Building work has now been completed on the £33m storage centre at the British Library’s Boston Spa site and it is now about to be fitted out with around 50km of robotic shelving.

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey yesterday visited the purpose-built facility, which will eventually house around 290,000 bound volumes containing 750 million pages of newsprint.

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The collection, some of which dates back 300 years, includes copies of every edition of the Yorkshire Post ever printed.

The building, which will replace an ageing archive in North London, has been designed to protect the newspapers with temperature and humidity controls and a low-oxygen atmosphere to minimise fire risk.

Steve Morris, a British Library director, said it was important to preserve the collection for future generations.

“Newspapers are an incredible contemporaneous record of history and we think they are
an absolute treasure trove,” he said.

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The newspapers are to be moved from the Colindale archive in the capital from next October and the process is expected to take around a year.

Around 700 people are employed at the Boston Spa site – nearly 40 per cent of the British Library’s workforce.

Mr Morris said more jobs would be created or secured in the region by the move.

Work is also under way to digitise the collection together with online publisher Brightsolid.

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Around six million pages have already been completed and uploaded to the online British Newspaper Archive and a further 40 million are expected to be digitised on site at Boston Spa by the end of the decade.