Why the British Library Is Spending $55 Million on News Archives

Just 2 percent of the British Library's massive archive of print newspapers have been digitized. That's going to change. The institution is completing a seven-year effort to upgrade its news archives, a $55 million (£33 million) project that's aimed at expanding the library's definition of "news."

Curator Luke McKernan said that "news" can mean "anything of relevance to a particular community at a particular point in time." Most people by now will acknowledge that news is recorded in newspapers and on Facebook and on Twitter and on blogs, etc., etc., but McKernan said he's also thinking about "diaries, oral history, recordings, maps, posters, letters," and so on.

McKernan wants to establish links between different kinds of resources, a strategy that's becoming increasingly important as institutions like libraries rethink how their resources will fit into a larger network of interconnected data and information online.