Website improvements
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Poor Page Quality
Ability to flag scan quality issues with some pages and get them rectified.
12 votesOpen - Under review ·AdminThe British Newspaper Archive (Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive) responded
Good idea – we will add this into the list
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Exact search is inexact
Get 'exact match' to work as expected. At present, a search for 'John Beare' may return occurrences of 'bear', 'bearing', etc., and also show 'John' and 'Beare' when they occur separately rather than together.
11 votes -
Allow changing page in fullscreen
Currently, when looking through an issue of a publication, it is a process (once the issue is found) of: click on page, click fullscreen, go back to standard screen; select another page, click fullscreen, go back to standard screen; and so on.
This could be: click on first page, click fullscreen, click or scroll to next page.11 votes -
Start by adding the papers people are voting for ?
Otherwise pointless asking people
11 votes -
Improve usability and navigation
I tried to give you feedback but the text box for feedback is so tiny I resorted to screenshots in a PDF file to demonstrate.
Although I love the content on this site and am happy to pay for the digitization of new papers, the usability of this site needs improvement.
11 votesOpen - Under review ·AdminThe British Newspaper Archive (Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive) responded
This is amazing pieces of feedback – thankyou! Some of it is already on our radar, but we will review this with our Product Director and Head of Design and aim to start feeding some of this into the product over the coming year. We really appreciate the time and care you have taken over this.
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Volunteers
There are (understandably) a lot of errors in the text. Allow volunteers to proof read transcriptions and compare to the image for errors. To ensure this isn't used to bypass subscription you can randomly generate which pages are proof read.
11 votes -
Next/previous day
Provide a forward/backward button when viewing a page so that you can skip to the same page in the next/previous day of the same publication
11 votes -
Make sure uploaded papers don't disappear
I notice that previous feedback refers to the falling number of newspapers available during the WWI period. I have had a similar problem today, in that one previously accessed newspaper (London Daily News, 22.08.1891) appears to have completely vanished from your site. I accessed it on the 24th February this year, but because the quality of the downloaded PDF was not great (another minor gripe), I wanted to check the original, to no avail.
Can you clarify whether or not vanishing newspapers are a common problem? Is it just your database being temperamental, or are certain uploads only temporary? Thanks…
11 votesOpen - Being developed ·AdminThe British Newspaper Archive (Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive) responded
We are now working on a process to add back in the newspapers we had to remove temporarily for copyright reasons – expect some good news soon!
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date range search within multiple years
Extra search field for a date range that can be searched for EVERY year i.e. to aid research on specific events such as traditional local festivals. e.g. an ability to search 17th to 25th March every year to narrow down information on St Patricks celebrations
10 votes -
payment options
paypal payment option
10 votes -
Search within a saved (bookmarked) page
I have a lot of saved pages but when I review them often I can't find any highlighted search term on the page. On some pages the original search term blue box is still there which saves a lot of time finding the part of the page I need. I find myself taking a lot of screen shots and filing elsewhere, which shouldn't be necessary.
10 votes -
Ability to correct article sections, eg split, exclude, merge
When editing, I often find the selected "article" in fact includes multiple unconnected texts on the page. If I am going to help edit as I go anyway, I would rather I could fix this by eg, marking a line as being the end of an article, or not in the article at all when the selected texts are not related? Similarly, the ability to add by marking as part of the article when not currently selected. The thee common situations I see are: selected text continues past end of actual article (a split feature would help here); select text…
10 votes -
paste whole articles corrected text / wider editing box
Being able to cut and paste a whole corrected article in one go - not line by line. AND do check out ideas from NZ papers past Love your site THANKS!!!!
10 votes -
9 votes
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Resolution should match the page your viewing
When you download the file, the resolution automatically is reduced making small text unreadable. Please correct this so that downloaded pdfs match the viewer
9 votes -
Rejuvenate your records for the Nottingham Post, Derby Telegraph
Stoke Sentinel and Leicester Mercury holdings as they are looking a little tired and outdated, nothing like a quick spruce up will have them gleaming once again with newer fresher titles added
9 votes -
Ability to sort bookmarked articles
It would improve this site immeasurably if it were possible to sort bookmarked articles by date of publication (or source) once they have been saved into a folder.
At present there is no way of organising articles once they have been bookmarked, except by moving them between folders. This makes any sort of chronological research incredibly difficult. It would not be difficult to introduce a 'sort by' field in the bookmarks page, given that the date metadata already exists.
9 votes -
Ability to select part of a page to save
If you want to save a specific article, it would helpful if you could select just that part of the page to save. By enlarging the relevant section on screen and then saving just that part, the quality of the image is much better than if you save the whole page and then try to edit the resultant pdf file. I have tried making screen clips using OneNote and this is reasonably successful, but you end up with several individual files and these need to be stitched together to make on file.
9 votes -
Lots Need Re-Scanning
Lots of the newspapers need re-scanning, particularly looking at Cambridge Chronicle, the OCR is terrible with some, the originals just need lightening to make them easier for you to OCR
9 votes -
Sneaky behaviour
Be a bit more obviously upfront about what people are signing up for.
8 votesOpen - Under review ·AdminThe British Newspaper Archive (Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive) responded
Can you give us a little more detail on this? What aspects of the service would need to be clearer?
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