Four million newspaper pages have been put online as part of a massive history project. The British Newspaper Archive website includes pages from more than 200 different papers from across the UK and Ireland with first hand accounts of events including the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Pages from the Aberdeen Journal, Belfast Newsletter, Western Mail and Manchester Evening News are all included in the project. Stories covered include murder trials, tales of transportation to Australia and the rise of the railways.

Readers can also search letters, illustrations and advertisements published in the papers which date back to the early 18th century and cover cities including Birmingham, Derby, Rochdale and Carlisle.

A team of experts have spent a year at the British Library’s Newspaper Library at Colindale, north London, digitising up to 8,000 pages a day. They expect to scan up to 40 million pages over the next 10 years.

Source: Google News, November 29, 2011