The newspapers in the Front Page exhibition don't belong to the British Library

One thing that came out of the talk by Torin Douglas to the AUKML conference in Edinburgh which was news to me, was that whilst exhorting people to attend it before it closes this weekend, he pointed out that the newspapers on display at the British Library's quite fantastic exhibition "Front Page" didn't come from the British Library itself.

Apparently their collection of newspapers is too preciously bundled into tight old leather-bound volumes with titles like "The Times, September 1956 - November 1958" to be prised apart to be put on public display.

In fact all of the newspapers came from a collector called John Frost. He got obsessed with the printed press at an early age and started collecting newspaper, and has then made a successful business out of loaning historic newspapers to researchers, theatres and television productions.

And, so it seems, the British Library.

This post is one of a number of posts about my visit to the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh

These include A tour of the National Library of Scotland, You can't exhibit code - a tour around the Scottish Museum, Torin Douglas on the digital media explosion, Blogs and technology in the National Library of Scotland's 'Discover NLS' magazine, Brian Kelly on Web 2.0, and The newspapers in the Front Page exhibition don't belong to the British Library

Posted by Martin Belam, October 5, 2006    
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