In 2014, the British Library had digitized two percent of the print newspapers in their news archives and they planned to take this digitization effort a few steps further. A seven-year effort began that would greatly advance the amount of digitized content in the news archives, while simultaneously changing what content is considered news. Instead of creating a strict definition of news items for their archives, the British Library has expanded their definition of news related items include, "anything of relevance to a particular community at a particular point in time."[1] This means that the British Library's news archives will accept anything considered linked with news related history such as diaries, maps, oral histories, posters, letters, and more. This is a much larger scope for collecting, and the collections of the British Library will drastically expand as the institution implements this new definition.
Collections policies should be reviewed by institutions, and revised to ensure that the content of their archives furthers their mission and is adequately accessible to the communities that they serve. For many institutions the restriction of what content they collect and maintain is necessary to ensure that their collections are not retaining irrelevant materials or items that are drastically inconsistent with the overall content of the collections. Revisions to a collections policy may expand the scope of what an institution will collection, but the complete revision of the definition of something like news may lead to an overwhelming shift in content for an archive. The British Library's new acceptance of any material with some connection to news could ultimately prove disastrous for many reasons. One, with such a broad concept of what constitutes as news material will lead to an over abundance of content that will be entered into the collections. This could cause a backlog for the archivists to process leading to a delay in digitization which will limit access. Two, donors may choose the British Library news archives for their collections, when the content would be better used in another institution who's mission would better maintain the materials of the donors. Finally, without a concrete understanding of what exactly the news archives will provide, researchers may be confused as to what they may gleam from their collections. Researchers may also not think to look towards the news archives for such items as diaries and letters, given that these are not currently universally viewed as news materials.
[1]Lafrance, Adrienne. "Why the British Library is Spending $55 Million on News Archives." The Atlantic. (April 29, 2014). http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/the-british-library-is-spending-55m-on-news-archives/361346/
