There’s a warm, musty waft of knowledge in the air, a comforting scent of human experience rising from age-stiffened paper. Shut your eyes and you could be in a dilapidated secondhand bookshop. Open them and you are in a vision of the future.
A gigantic robotic vault, the National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa, near Leeds, is the British Library’s high-tech approach to safeguarding what it rather endearingly terms “the national memory” – 750m pages of news, covering more than three centuries of goings-on, as reported in papers across the nation. From political turmoil to humanitarian crisis, murder cases to local marriage notices, it’s all here. And it’s growing. “We’re adding something like 1,200 titles every week,” says Alasdair Bruce, manager of the British Library Newspaper Programme.
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