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The British Library has announced a 10-year project to make 40m pages from its newspaper archive available online.

The record of more than 300 years of journalism, including coverage of the Crimean and Boer Wars, will be put on the web by the publisher BrightSolid.

The move will spare historians having to search the current hard copy and microfilm collection.

The digital material will be made free to users at the main library site at St Pancras, north London.

A charge will be levied for searches conducted from outside the library.

The British Library's archive contains about 750m newspaper pages, including 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles.

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said: "Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail.

"By making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print.

"It will help the newspaper collection to remain relevant for a new generation of researchers, more used to accessing research information via their laptop than travelling to a physical location."

To read the complete article, see: British Library to digitise 40m of its newspaper pages (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8690919.stm)