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How can we improve The British Newspaper Archive?

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34 results found

  1. How to Search for Obituaries with Limited Information?

    Hi everyone,

    I'm hoping someone here might be able to offer some advice. I'm trying to locate an obituary for a distant relative who I believe passed away in the late 1950s or early 1960s, likely in the Manchester area. Unfortunately, I only have a rough estimate of the time period and a partial name — I know the surname (Thompson), and possibly the first initial (J or G).

    I've tried some keyword combinations in the search bar, but I'm struggling to narrow it down without hundreds of unrelated results. Are there any tips or tricks for refining obituary searches…

    1 vote
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  2. Correcting transcription errors

    If I copy out an article, I like to correct transcription errors so others benefit from the corrected version,

    But your system if very frustrating, as fast as I can correct errors then more appear.

    I usually just copy to my PC and edit there so no one else benefits from my work.

    Comments are limited to 500 characters so I cannot even paste the corrected version there.

    JMB

    2 votes
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    Pending - For future development  ·  1 comment  ·  Admin →
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  3. Option to turn off unwanted frills.

    Please provide an option to turn off saved searches and all other pop-ups so that the search is simple like it used to be.

    1 vote
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  4. Requesting a rescan of images

    How do we re request to have a page rescanned when half is missing, but is complete on next page?

    Edinburgh Evening News - Monday 01 April 1912, Page 3 has the far column halved - but on page 4 the column on the edge is complete.

    This is a scanning issue and could be corrected by a rescan

    1 vote
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  5. Make it easy to scroll through the pages of a newspapers

    I use the site for historical research, and so I might want to look at a series of newspapers around a specific date to see what was happening. It would be great to be able to scroll through a newspaper;s pages (paticularly when viewing on iPad) rather than the 3-4 clicks needed to flick between pages. I'm thinking similar to a Kindle experience - eg one click or tap to skip a page

    5 votes
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  6. Web Site performance and OCR

    Firstly I think you are doing a great thing with this archive; good job!
    However my experience of trying to contribute to your project in a small way and correct the plethora of errors which your very basic OCR generates in the articles I am researching has been very frustrating. Reviewing and correcting a few thousand words is taking hours when it should take maybe only an hour if the performance of the website was quicker and if the user interface for editing had been better designed. In Microsoft Word or some similar software I can see all the errors…

    4 votes
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    1 comment  ·  feedback  ·  Admin →
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  7. Voting for a publication instructions

    My colleagues and myself have been struggling to vote for a newspaper to be recommended for digitisation. We are not computer illiterates but have found the voting process far from intuitive, particularly as you have to create a second password in order to vote. Do you have some clear instructions we could share with others who have been put off attempting to vote?

    3 votes
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  8. Ability to Clip Articles

    Ability to clip articles as opposed to downloading the page in its entirety without any boundaries for the information you're actually interested in preserving. Think Newspapers.com. For the price of admission the feature is sorely needed.

    2 votes
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  9. Please put Newspaper title in downloaded filename

    Currnently PDF files downloaded are in the form of BL0000564193810312510011.pdf - can the first ID be replaced with the newspaper title, please? e.g. BLDundeeCourier19381031251_0011.pdf - there is currently no way to link an image to a newspaper without manually viewing the image.

    3 votes
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  10. Download a full newspaper

    Could you make it possible to download a complete edition of a newspaper in one go rather than having to download each individual page?

    5 votes
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  11. Save a single article

    I have been reading for a couple of years that you hope to make it possible to save a single article instead of a whole page but I haven’t seen any progress in providing this, are you actually going to provide this option? it is why I let my subscription lapse, I would rejoin if this was sorted.

    14 votes
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  12. academic citations

    adding a citation button to help with citing your amazing newspaper

    12 votes
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    1 comment  ·  feedback  ·  Admin →
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  13. Search for a phrase is often ignored

    When I search for a phrase, for example "W. Hunter" to get only hits for "W. Hunter" it is very annoying that I get endless hits for just "W." Can the search engine not be taught to ONLY look for "W. Hunter" ?

    6 votes
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    2 comments  ·  feedback  ·  Admin →
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  14. Exact searching

    Because words like "and", "of" etc. seem to be used as operators, I often can't use them in the way I'd like. For example, I want to search for the EXACT phrase "The Horse and Hounds". At the moment, I can't see how to do it.
    I would like to be able to search for an EXACT phrase , e.g. "The Horse and Hounds" without

    2 votes
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  15. Facility to download pages as JPEG as well asPDF

    Please display on Edge to full screen as on Chrome

    3 votes
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  16. Pages for all counties

    Some coverage of all uk counties in the first instance...still many with no pages at all.

    1 vote
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  17. highlighting in editing box

    It would be extremely helpful if the blue highlighting box (search result) on the image could be replicated in the editing box so as to save lots of iterative attempts to find that highlighted text for editing.

    4 votes
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  18. adoption of corrections

    When I edit an article's text, when are those corrections taken into account for a future search? I have been doing corrections for months and none of them have been picked up in subsequent searches.

    6 votes
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  19. Previous/next result

    Add ‘Previous result’ and ‘Next result’ links to each page shown from a list of search results, so that it is not necessary to return to the results list before viewing the next result. The Times Digital Archive already has this facility.

    2 votes
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  20. Zooming feature

    I've just rejoined after a couple of years away... maybe it's because I am using Chrome now but when I zoom in to read a highlighted result, I cannot move the page around so the highlight if off the screen... I do not want to have to make a pdf of every result, however tangential to my research! Maybe there should be arrows/ + and - signs, for zooming/navigating a page that are not appearing on my screen? I am having a similar issue on ancestry so it maybe a browser issue

    36 votes
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    12 comments  ·  Admin →
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