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Overview
UKPressOnline provides several major United Kingdom tabloid newspapers from 1835 to the present day. The titles include historical and current issues of Daily Express & Sunday Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Star (& Sunday), Morning Star and Church Times. Additional historical content includes Daily Worker, The Watchman, Yorkshire Post, British Union of Fascists press (Action! The Blackshirt & Fascist Week), and selected WWI & WWII-era resources.
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Details
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CRL Review
Collection Content
UKPressOnline is a full-text searchable database of digitized tabloid newspapers published in the UK.
Titles in UKPressOnline include the right-leaning tabloid Daily Express (1900-present) and the populist Daily Mirror (1903-present). These titles, while not the widest-circulated tabloids in the UK, represent two significant publications among Britain’s popular press. Also included in the collection are shorter runs (2000-present) of the Sunday Express, the downmarket tabloid Daily Star, and the left-wing Morning Star. Content for current resources is updated daily.
Added to this core collection of tabloids are several other (slightly incongruous) resources, including:
- The Church Times (1863-present), the “world's largest-selling Anglican newspaper”;
- A historical run of The Watchman & Wesleyan Advertiser (1835-1884), a Methodist weekly;
- A collection of titles published between 1914 and 1918 covering World War I, including several regional titles;
- A collection of World War II editions of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, the Socialist Daily Worker and several Fascist papers published in England.
UKPressOnline is provided by Digitorial Ltd, under licence from Trinity Mirror Plc, Express Newspapers Ltd and other publishers.
Delivery
UKPressOnline offers both a simple search (by keyword or date) as well as advanced search functions. The advanced search allows users to construct Boolean searches for keywords, exact phrases, or word beginnings; to limit by title(s) and specific dates; and to restrict searches to front pages only (as opposed to full body content). This last feature may prove useful for keying into top news stories or front-page spreads that were pioneered by early British tabloids.
OCR is uncorrected, so search results may not be comprehensive. From 2001 forward, most pages are rendered as “print-ready PDFs” (i.e., born digital resources), so search results will be vastly improved for more recent content.
Search results may be viewed as page thumbnails, or as thumbnails with highlighted text in context. Selecting a result displays a TIFF preview of the relevant page, from which a user may then zoom to a larger low-resolution (100dpi) page image, or download the full page in PDF format. PDF files contain a higher-resolution image (150dpi or greater) with embedded OCR text. Users are allowed to download and reuse the PDF files per the education license. Downloading of full issues is not possible, requiring users to view each page separately.
Users may also scroll through additional pages of the selected issue, or browse to the next or previous issues of the title. Registered users may save pages to a personal “Bookshelf” for later viewing.
Subject to subscription limitations, users can currently search only the portion of the content to which the institution is subscribed. Users who are not viewing through an institutional subscription may search and view thumbnails only.
Terms
Content from UKPressOnline may be offered as a complete package, or via selected portions (Express & Mirror package, WWII, Fascist Press, etc).
UKPressOnline offers one-time perpetual purchase for the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, Church Times, and the Fascist press. Perpetual purchase for other content is not presently available.
UKPressOnline is not currently COUNTER compliant. Statistics are, however, provided in a form that is based on the same methods as used by COUNTER.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The database includes two of the major tabloid dailies and Sunday editions in the UK. Though perhaps not “papers of record,” this collection may still be considered a valuable resource for study of 20th century British social history.
Missing from the collection are other Trinity newspapers such as the weekly People and Scotland’s Daily Record, among others. The database also presents an incomplete picture of British tabloid coverage, as it does not include other popular papers such as Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, the middle-market Daily Mail, and many weekly (Sunday) tabloids.
The database offers sufficient and familiar navigability to facilitate search requests. However, as the OCR for early issues is uncorrected, users must be cautioned to use different strategies to search for relevant content.
Reviewers
James Simon, CRL
Community Ratings
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