Should newspaper preservation be a lottery?

April 1999 saw the first major preservation award to libraries by the UK's Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF); a grant of £5 million was made towards a nationally co-ordinated preservation-microfilming programme for local newspapers. The NEWSPLAN project aims to microfilm and make more accessible thousands of fragile local and regional newspaper. The first phase ran from 1983 until 1996, leading to the publication of ten reports identifying holdings, and was the subject of an Editorial in JoLIS in September 1993. The second phase aims to secure their preservation. The HLF grant is for the first stage in an ambitious programme of work over a five-year period that ultimately aims to cover 3,460 titles dating between 1800 to 1950, create 83,816 reels of microfilm, and includes the provision of 800 microfilm readers, at a total cost of £16.3 million. The £5 million from the HLF is only the first tranche of the programme; the participating libraries will make contributions in kind and another £2 million is sought from the UK newspaper industry and other companies. Beneficiaries of the project will include libraries, schools and historical researchers in many disciplines.

The HLF was set up to award grants from the highly successful National Lottery which would 'safeguard and enhance the heritage of the United Kingdom' (Heritage Lottery Fund, 1997). Its remit encompasses the preservation of 'buildings, objects and the environment, whether man-made or natural, which have been important in the formation of the character and identity of the United Kingdom and which will be a vital part in its future'. Implicit within this phrase is the preservation of Britain's uniquely rich and varied written heritage, which is among our greatest treasures, and also responsibilities. However, hitherto concern has been expressed that, libraries and archives have not had a fair share of the £1.7 billion awarded from the Lottery. The overwhelming majority of the 2,633 grants so far have gone to other more tangible and visible projects. Thus all concerned with this successful bid deserve the congratulation of their colleagues in the library and information communities.

However in doing so, there is a need to question why this project should have been successful compared with others, and whether the chosen micrographic technology is the right one, compared with digital alternatives that may be on, or at least just over, the horizon. Finally it is perhaps worth asking the question as to whether the somewhat parochial contents of local and regional newspapers warrant the money and attention that is to be devoted to their preservation over the next five years - at least when compared with so many other categories of literature?

The first of these questions is relatively easy to answer, and perhaps has useful lessons for other future submissions to the HLF. The great strength of the NEWSPLAN bid is that it was submitted by a consortium of different groups rather than an individual institution. Collaborators in the project include representatives of public, academic, and national libraries, and also the newspaper industry. NEWSPLAN is based on regions corresponding to the ten Regional Library Systems of the UK and Ireland, and is a Panel of LINC, the Library and Information Co-operation Council. The British Library Newspaper Library also plays a leading role in support of the project, and likewise the National Libraries of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. NEWSPLAN also has a considerable track record. From 1985, every local newspaper title in the UK has been catalogued, and those titles in urgent need of preservation identified.

Libraries and archival institutions have found it hard to raise the partnership funding that is required by the HLF in order to get started on an application, although the Fund has revised its rules so that applicants seeking grants of under £100,000 need raise only a minimum of 10%. Grants over this sum require 25% partnership funding, but NEWSPLAN has an established track record in securing such co-operation. An important element in the successful bid is that participating organisations will also commit their own resources, if not in money, at least in kind. Likewise the financial support and co-operation of the newspaper industry was an important element.

A more difficult question to answer is why the project should have chosen to persevere with the use of micrographic technology at a time when the rest of the world seems to be moving in the direction of the digital storage and transmission of texts. Arguably, this is the use of a mid-twentieth century technology to solve a preservation problem stretching into the new millennium. Micrographic formats may offer considerable advantages in terms of their compactness of storage, and they are inevitably far more robust and stable than the poor quality newsprint used for provincial newspapers, especially those from the nineteenth century which are deteriorating at an alarming rate. Yet they are by no means a permanent answer to preservation problems, and they offer many disadvantages in access and usability of the texts. Microfilm in particular has never been popular among information users compared with the originals in hard copy. It requires expensive and cumbersome equipment that impedes rapid scanning and browsing, which is such an important element in accessing the text on any newspaper page.

Future users of preserved newspapers will be aware of the manifold advantages of digital storage formats and indeed will increasingly come across them using CD-ROM newspaper titles or provincial newspaper files available over the Internet. These advantages include remote access across computer networks, facilities for sophisticated free text searching, the ability to zoom in or out of a page, to download sections of text or graphic images and paste them into other documents. The information and communication technologies which are today an integral part of virtually all newspaper production, create machine readable files which will be the basis of future newspaper preservation, irrespective of the shelf-life of the printed copies. Any other long-term attempt at the preservation of local and provincial titles will be nonsense.

If this is the case for the future of newspaper preservation, why is the NEWSPLAN project investing so much in the blind-alley of outdated technology, for retrospective preservation rather than waiting for improvements in optical character recognition technology that would convert existing titles into machine readable texts? The answer is due to the urgency of the preservation problem, which necessitates some form of action now, before more titles are lost forever, and the inadequacies of existing OCR technology to cope with the rough and ready printing quality found in local newspapers. Newspapers were never intended by their producers to be a permanent means of storing textual information, and the recognition that they contain a mass of valuable information not available elsewhere, is only a comparatively recent phenomenon.

One of the reasons for the rapid growth in newspaper titles during the nineteenth century, was the development and use of cheaper materials for the manufacture of papers that replaced the traditional, but increasingly expensive, cotton waste. The introduction of wood pulps during the middle years of the nineteenth century revolutionised newspaper publishing, but has created an increasingly urgent preservation problem, as they become and brittle due to the effects of acidity. Clearly there is no point in preserving such texts in hard copy, if it merely results in items that are too fragile to be used. For all its inadequacies, preservation standard microfilming will at least result in a stable text, which can be used and reproduced as necessary, and will perhaps form the basis of future attempts to convert them into digital formats.

The last two decades has seen enormous developments in the use of OCR technologies to convert existing printed documents into machine-readable files. Scanners, and software are now readily available that will cope with modern texts, and perform a creditable and generally reliable conversion job. However the present state of technology is still inadequate to cope with the tiny printing fonts, or poor quality printing and paper used in most local and provincial newspapers.

The main issue was one of cost in adopting a 'scan first approach' rather than microfilm approach, which during the first year would be in the region of £43 million, compared to £2 million. Several research projects, including the British Library's attempt to digitise the Burney Collection of early newspapers have investigated the problem but hitherto they have not provided a sufficiently reliable or cost effective alternative to microfilm. (Carpenter, Shaw and Prescott, 1997 and Weber and Dorr, 1997). The use of scanners would mean that existing volumes would have to be disbound, and there is still debate about the longevity of existing digital formats. Microfilm remains the internationally recognised standard for archiving and will be used to capture all 3,500 titles within the HLF-funded project. Yet at the same, all concerned recognise the importance of digital technology in improving access and will be making this a cornerstone of the NEWSPLAN Development Plan for 1999 - 2004, currently in preparation.

My final question as to the value of the information contained in local and provincial newspapers, is of course a rhetorical one. I write both as an enthusiastic user of early provincial newspapers, but who is also supervising a PhD student who has been investigating their value as a historical source. In the words of Anthea Case, Director of the Heritage Lottery Fund they represent:

an invaluable resource into the study of our past. They provide a detailed record of the changing social patterns of community and national life, important material for genealogical studies, and an intrinsic record of the development of the UK press. Local newspapers have a particularly valuable role as they provide extensive information about local events and the way in which each local community perceived them at the time. (Heritage Lottery Fund Press Release 25th March 1999)

There are in fact two issues involved: firstly the value of newspapers as an information source, and secondly whether local and provincial newspapers have any unique value compared to other contemporary sources of information. Of course their usefulness to individuals will depend upon the period and subject matter under investigation, and the range of alternative sources available. In spite of the inconveniences of their format, and their reputation for sensationalism bias and inaccuracy, newspapers nevertheless provide a unique and readily accessible glimpse of the unfolding nature of events. They indicate that state of knowledge or of public opinion at a given time, that no amount of subsequent analysis and more considered reflection can provide. Newspapers are not merely historical sources for academics, but have an equally important role in education and for all that are interested in the past. Of course any reasonably sophisticated reader knows that all newspapers are at times inaccurate or else select, interpret, and at times distort the events they report. Indeed some newspapers even today will print what amounts to little more than barefaced lies. They must therefore be used with care - yet this must apply to any historical source.

Recognition of the specific importance of local and provincial newspapers in Britain is also a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the last few decades British history writing was dominated by events taking place in the capital, with a consequent undervaluing of the relative importance of provincial life. This does not merely apply to events taking place on a national political stage, but to all aspects of economic, social, cultural and local political life. There has also been more emphasis on social and cultural history as opposed to political history and the growing pastimes of local and family history. Thus where historians have consulted newspapers in a systematic way, it has tended to be restricted to those national titles such as the Times.

My own enthusiasm for local newspapers dates from 1971, when I was employed as an Assistant Librarian in Norwich Public Library, the city which could boast the earliest English provincial newspaper the Norwich Post, founded by Francis Burges in 1701. The library only had a few copies of the Post, but it had a unique almost complete set of the rival Norwich Gazette, founded in 1707, after Burges's death. It also had equally valuable holdings of another title the Norwich Mercury running from the early 1720s to the end of the century, and beyond. At the time I was researching a history of the book trades in the city prior to 1760, and although I was warned that provincial newspapers for my period were frequently little more than local reprints of national titles, I felt bound to consult them. Thus during my lunch hours, the half days prior to my late evening shifts, and occasionally when there were no enquiries forthcoming from library users, I would work my way systematically through these two titles, and made notes of anything in them which interested me.

The results of my labours provided me with a mass of material and background information for my thesis, which I could sometimes pursue or verify in other sources. However they frequently provided the only report of events and phenomena which were fundamental in determining the shape of my final account. However, in addition my researches over an 18-month period provided me with a gold mine of related information relating to local politics, education, industries, crime, sport social and cultural events that I have used many times over the last quarter of a century. Unfortunately I had to stop the systematic scanning at the year 1760 and replace it with intermittent scanning, simply in order to prevent myself being overwhelmed with material, and to give me time to write up and digest what I had. However I promised myself that one day I would have the time to go back and complete work on the remainder of the century.

The ironic thing was that both of these newspaper titles were printed in convenient folio and quarto formats on good quality rag paper. They were both well bound and were therefore far easier to use than the massive nineteenth century equivalents which were already clearly subject to decay. Thus these valuable titles were never given a high priority in the rather tentative microfilming programme that was then taking place. Fortunately the Mercury had been filmed, but not the Gazette.  The originals of both titles were lost in the fire of August 1994, which destroyed much of the central library, whereas most of the later more fragile titles were preserved.

There is a wealth of information in our local newspapers, which is just as much a part of the national heritage as historic buildings, monuments, or the countryside. The HLF grant is therefore a significant recognition of this fact.

David Stoker (with thanks to Jane Secker)

May 1999

Stoker, David (1993), Editorial: Preserving our newspaper heritage, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, XXV, (3), 113-117.

Heritage Lottery Fund (1997) http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/causes/heritage.html

Heritage Lottery Fund, Press Release 25th March 1999, Local newspapers in peril awarded Heritage Lottery Fund lifeline

Carpenter, Leona, Shaw, Simon and Prescott, Andrew. (eds) (1998) Towards the digital library: The British Library’s Initiatives for Access Programme. The British Library: London.