Federation Of Family History Societies

Newspaper Library at Colindale, North London

At the Federation's Autumn General Meeting last year I drew attention to the invitation to meet Patrick Fleming, Head of Newspaper Operations for The British Library. On 24 January a small group of family historians duly met Patrick to learn more about the migration of the Newspaper Library to Boston Spa, Yorkshire and to see behind the scenes at Colindale.

We learned that there are in fact two buildings at Colindale used for storing the Newspaper Library. The smaller building (120 Colindale Avenue) is used purely for storage and it is already full. In addition, the lease on this building expires on 31 December 2010 and is not renewable. The other building (130 Colindale Avenue) is used for storage and also holds the reading rooms which are familiar to many.

Both buildings are far from ideal for the preservation and storage of newspapers. The British Library already has another storage facility at Boston Spa where there is a new, world-class storage facility for books and similar items. This is not suitable for the storage of newspapers and so it is proposed to build a Newspaper Storage Building on the same site for completion in 2012. Treasury approval for this is awaited, with a decision expected shortly.

During our tour of Colindale we saw where microfilm copies of newspapers are produced and also saw a small proportion of the vast array of shelves containing the bound volumes of newspapers. The British Library is actively seeking commercial partners to work with them to produce digital copies of the historic newspapers. An announcement on this is expected in May 2009.

Some newspapers are so fragile that they cannot be made available to the general public. It is hoped that in due course it will be possible to produce digital copies of the least fragile of these.

The microfilm copies will remain available at Colindale until 2012, after which they will be available at St Pancras. Hard copy newspapers will begin to move from the smaller Colindale building in early 2010 and the task of transferring the collection to Boston Spa will continue until late in 2012. Where no microfilm or digital copies (or surrogates) exist it will be possible to view the hard copies at Boston Spa as long as they are not too fragile to handle. It is recognised that this is likely to stimulate new interest from those who would not have travelled to Colindale but for whom a visit to Boston Spa is feasible.

As digital surrogates become available they will be viewable at St Pancras and Boston Spa. Where surrogates do not exist, it will not be possible to ask for hard copies to be sent from Boston Spa to St Pancras; Boston Spa will be the only place to view them. On the other hand, microfilm surrogates will be viewable only at St Pancras. It is hoped that by 2017 the majority of requests will be satisfied from the newly created archive of digital surrogates. Nearer to that time a solution will be devised for dealing with those requests that cannot be satisfied in that way. It might even consist of producing digital surrogates on demand and emailing them to readers.

We were very grateful to Patrick for giving up his time to explain to us the issues surrounding the move to Boston Spa and for taking us behind the scenes at Colindale.

Roger Lewry
Archives Liaison
12 February 2009