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As part of the South West Newsplan meeting I was lucky enough to have a tour of Colindale.
British Library Newspaper Storage will soon move to Boston Spa There is no environmental control at Colindale and space is limited. There is already 28 miles of shelving and 69000 bound volumes.
It was interesting to see that volumes should be stored vertically as currently some of our bound volumes are horizontal in drawers. This is due to space restrictions but in the future it would be advisable to store correctly.
The bound volumes at Colindale are stored chronologically in the order they were bound, they are not stored geographically. Each volume has a unique number. This is very efficient but retrieval can be tricky as the same titles are stored on multiple floors.
National newspapers are stored by title due to heavy usage.
Researchers using the library only get the original bound volume if no microfilm is available. Original newspapers are still collected and will continue to be at Boston Spa. As publishers want income from digital newspapers only those out of copyright are being digitised.
It was interesting to witness the microfilming process… newspapers are ironed before being photographed! Retrospective filming is ongoing together with new papers. Digitisation from microfilm costs £1 per page and is searchable. However to digitise most papers have to be refilmed.
Microfilms are stored in a temperature controlled environment on mobile shelving.
The British Library also has 80-90% of all free press and different trade magazines for example, Melody Maker and Radio Times. The titles to be taken to Boston Spa are currently under review.
The original reading room dating from 1932 is beautiful and seems an apt place to research and discover. When reading is moved from microfilm to PC the papers will sadly not be browsable.
