For the last three years we have been working quietly in the background to digitise the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald’s extensive newspaper archive.
Part of Andy Barr’s motivation to buy the Herald in 2020 was his wish to preserve the heritage of the paper.
Traditionally, the newspaper has been archived in bound copies, one copy of each week’s edition kept to aside, and then sent to Preston to be bound into a large hardback book.
As technologies developed, this turned into CD storage, then digital PDFs, but the bulk of our archive remained in the 200+ bound books of newspapers stored in our offices.
The unwieldiness of these books, and the fragility of the paper meant that the only regular access to the archive was for our Looking Back page, drawing on the 25, 50 and 100 year article reprints.
With the move to the current office space on Middlegate, Penrith, imminent we understood there would be even more space and access restrictions on the archive.
At that point we began active research into the best way to store the archive going forward and increase its usability.
This led to the pursuit of two projects: one to safely store the paper archive in a climate-controlled space and secondly to digitise our extensive newspaper archive.
After exploring many options, we settled on a collaboration with Ancestry, the company famous for their genealogy records and digitisation software.
They had recently launched a new branch of Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, which aims to be the largest collection of digital newspapers worldwide.
They were incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, and we were very excited to ship our microfilm archive to their digitisation plant in Lehi, Utah earlier this year.
Last week, we were then given access to our fully text searchable, readable, digital newspaper archive which spans from our first edition in 1860 until 1991.
Subsequent dates are being added presently, as the CD archives are processed and uploaded.
We hope that this will herald in a new era for the paper, as we begin to truly highlight the treasure trove of local history which we have been quiet custodians of for the last 165 years.
Navigating the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald’s archive
To access the archive, go to www.newspapers.com, this will take you to the Herald archive landing page.
From here you will be able to search for names, places, key words and dates.
You will be asked to make a profile to access the archive which, like other Ancestry platforms, does incur a subscription cost.
There are various levels of subscription depending on how long you would like access, and whether you only want to search the Herald or if you would like access to the other titles on the site too.
All in all there are over 27,000 newspaper archives on the site, with other 11 billion individual newspaper pages – and 76,732 of those pages belong to the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald!
There are helpful videos on the home page – introduction and learn how to search – which show you how to make the most of the archive.
There is also the ability to take virtual clippings of pages or stories, which you can then share directly via email, or to social media, or save to your computer.
