As we hope all will know by now, British Library Newspapers at Colindale closed on 8 November 2013, and we are busy remodelling what was the Business & IP 2 Reading Room on Floor 2 at the British Library's St Pancras site to create a new News & Media Reading Room which will open in March 2014.

While this work is taking place, we can only offer a restricted newspaper (and other news media) service to researchers, but there should be enough available to satify a good many research needs between now and the end of March. This is a summary of what we are making available at St Pancras and online:

A. Digital, free access from all Reading Rooms 

1. British Newspaper Archive (BNA)
Almost 7 million searchable pages of newspapers from across the UK and Ireland. New
content will continue to be added to the BNA during the closure period.

2. UK and international newspaper electronic resources
The British Library subscribes to a range of newspaper electronic resources. Key ones
include The Times 1785-1985, the Daily Mail 1896-2004, the Daily Mirror 1903 to date,
The Guardian 1821-2003, the Illustrated London News 1842-2003, the New York Times
1851-2006, the Times of India 1838-2003, the Financial Times 1888-2009, The Scotsman
1817-1950, The Irish Times 1859-2008 and the 17th and 18th century Burney collection .

3. Readex – Selected historical newspaper collections
Provides access to these collections: Early American Newspapers Series I , Foreign
Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports 1974-1996, World Newspaper Archive:
African Newspapers 1800-1922, Latin American Newspapers Series I 1805-1922.

4. Broadcast news
Daily television and radio news programmes broadcast in the UK since May 2010. Over 
60 hours of news are recorded every day from 22 channels including BBC, ITV, Channel 4,
Sky News, Al Jazeera English and CNN.

Newspapers on microfilm

B. Microfilm, from specific Reading Rooms 

1. Pre 1801 London newspapers (part of the Burney collection) – Rare books & music
2. The Times, 1785 to Dec 2013 – Humanities 2 
3. South Asian newspapers - Asian and African studies
Substantial holdings of South Asian newspapers in the English language, which were
originally collected by the East India Company and the India Office.

C. Print

1. Newspapers in Asian and Middle-eastern languages – Asian and African studies
Including those published in the UK and received via legal deposit.

D. Remote access

1. British Newspaper Archive (BNA) - paid service

Almost 7 million searchable pages of newspapers from across the UK and Ireland. New 
content will continue to be added to the BNA during the closure period.  

2. Readex – Selected historical newspaper collections 

Provides access to these collections: Early American Newspapers Series I , Foreign 
Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports 1974-1996, World Newspaper Archive: 
African Newspapers 1800-1922, Latin American Newspapers Series I 1805-1922. Accessible to registered St Pancras reader pass holders only

E. Holdings in other libraries

1. Newsplan - reports on alternative holdings of UK, Irish regional and local newspapers 

Readers can check for alternative holdings of UK & Irish regional and local newspapers by
using the published Newsplan Reports which cover all regions of the UK and Ireland. A set
of these reports is available on the open reference shelves in the Humanities 2 Reading
Room. A number of these Newsplan Reports are available online.

2. COPAC - UK and international newspapers and periodicals

An online catalogue which provides unified access to the catalogues of some of the largest
university research libraries in the UK and Ireland.

3. We also have online guides to Newspapers Libraries and Collections around the world, Newspapers around the world on the Internet, Other News-related Publications on the Internet, and much more.

General information on our newspaper collections, newspaper catalogue, online newspapers and the collection moves can be found the general link http://newspapers.bl.uk, plus we have produced a set of FAQs on the newspaper moves. The keen-eyed may have noticed that all references to the Colindale library have now been removed from our site, but we still have much work to do to update all reference guides to our news collections in time for the new opening. It's going to be a busy few months.