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Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and
19th Centuries have been made available online by the British Library.
The public will now be able to scan the content of 200 titles from
around Britain and Ireland.
These will include historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and
Albert and the rise of the railways.
Ed King, the British Library's head of newspapers, said it opened up the
collection "as never before".
The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the
pages themselves.
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Other stories contained within the scanned pages include reporting on
the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Mr King said: "Rather than having to view the items on site at the
library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world
will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and
information contained in these pages.
"The ability to search across millions of articles will yield results
for each user that might previously have been the work of weeks or
months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse."
Included in the project are pages from the Aberdeen Journal, Belfast
Newsletter, Western Mail and Manchester Evening News.
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A team has spent a year at the British Library's newspaper library at
Colindale, north London, digitising up to 8,000 pages a day.
They expect to scan up to 40 million pages over the next 10 years.
Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative
Industries, said the archive was "a rich and hugely exciting resource".
He added: "I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within
seconds had 42,000 results - an indication of the breadth and variety of
material featured."
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