Translator Request: British Newspaper Archive

emmareisz
The British Newspaper Archive is a major archive of digitised UK and Ireland newspapers from the eighteenth century onward, scanned from the British Library's collection.

Creating a Zotero translator for the BNA would be challenging:
1. The BNA is paywalled, and the only library with access is the British Library.
2. The BNA does not seem to expose metadata, so it would be a scraper.

Would anyone else have a use for a BNA translator? Would anyone be interested in writing one?
  • adamsmith
    I don't think that'd be that hard and the site looks nice, but the 3 pages you get for free aren't going to cut it to write a translator, so someone involved needs to have access.
  • emmareisz
    Thanks for the interest, @adamsmith.

    It's a two-part job, I think, because the translator should scrape search results directly from the search results page (rather than pulling data from the linked records) for two reasons:
    - searching is not paywalled and is widely used by researchers without a subscription
    - one of BNA's payment options is 'Pay as you go' bundles of 40 pages, so users on that tariff would not want Zotero to use up their page credits.

    I'm pretty busy right now, but if someone else (who won't need paywall access) can write the part of the scraper that scrapes search results, then I should have time to do the part that scrapes from the scanned pages behind the paywall.
  • emmareisz
    Draft translator (both parts) is here.
  • pigsonthewing
    I would find this useful.

    Two additional points:

    * Anyone may access three entries, as part of a free trial.
    * Established Wikipedia editors may, from time to time, apply for a free account [1]. As you may know, Wikipedia uses Zotero translators in the back end of its 'Citoid' tool for adding citations to articles.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BNA
  • emmareisz
    Thanks, @pigsonthewing . I didn't know about BNA and Wikipedia - good to learn.

    To try out the translator, you need this file.

    Right-click anywhere in that text and select 'Save As...' (or similar) and save it somewhere you can find it again, with the name British Newspaper Archive.js. Then copy that file to the Translators folder of your Zotero data directory. Zotero will then use it automatically when you go to the BNA.

    If you do decide to test the BNA translator, please let me know how it goes.
  • pigsonthewing
    edited May 8, 2022
    Though this discussion is very old, I just wanted to note for the record that the British Library/ BNA have just made available 1 million PD newspaper page scans as free-to-read (signup required), with more to follow in coming years:

    https://blogs.bl.uk/thenewsroom/2021/08/free-to-view-online-newspapers.html
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