Britishnewspaperarchive Avis 

My account with British Newspaper Archive had become inoperative. Jamie was a great help and solved the various administration problems.

I have tried to pay a one off subscription, had my bank approve it using facial recognition, then received an “Error” message on the BNA website. Even using two different bank cards and 3 separate devices, the same thing happens. Their suggestion now is for me to join PayPal which I don’t want to do. Also, their website says 3 pages can be accessed free of charge. I have accessed only one and they still wish me to pay £22 to read the outcome of a particular trial. An obstructive and inadequate service.

My partner has tried to access the archives but her attempts to process payment is always declined. A young lady in customer services constantly says it’s a fraud issue and simply tells her to try again. That is so unhelpful. She does that with the same result.

I do not understand why employees in these organizations are unable to accept responsibility for their own systems not working. As Einstein said, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over again and expecting a different result.

So unhelpful, frankly.

The archival resources are immense, easily accessible and absolutely fascinating. Sophie in the support team, along with her colleagues, has always been so efficient and helpful over the years too. I would highly recommend all aspects of this experience.

This is mostly a rant, because the BNA does not actually care about their users—they don't need to. And anybody who needs to use the BNA has few alternatives, so real reviews are pointless.

The main issue is that the BNA's OCR is terrible. This is a longstanding issue, there's reviews about it from 10 years ago. The BNA has obviously done next to nothing about the problem.

Correcting it is probably not impossible, because I took a screenshot of a garbled article, and the free OCR on my computer processed it quite accurately. So the BNA's idea that the garbled search function is because of flaws with the newspaper itself is clearly rubbish.

Here is a very common example:
'.. In ai eiu.lameaiih her •••11-lmiau. kGdrl> -appiovert. Miceesstnl. srnsihle met lev Also ie.mn.ii, -u,wi .luous I*. . p , nmnenllt .ii»d •..ihmit m irk s. ,r. lo h-T Imiuoveil sis I.IA I »Lk lu Um-iiiust skillul niauiier p '.

They can't expect their users to correct this by transcribing whole articles. Even if their users had the inclination and time to do so, the BNA website ensures that you can only edit one garbled fragment of a sentence at a time, making corrections very impractical.

Additionally, reading the paper scans is a painful experience, because the zoom sensitivity is set bizarrely high.

I'd also like to note (with immense frustration) that 2 months of a paper that I am researching are inexplicably missing from the record. As others have noted, the BNA seems to have no rhyme or reason governing which papers they digitise. Apparently, this applies to months too.

The BNA obviously triumphs with sheer scale of digitised resources. And because it is a monopoly, it is obviously necessary to pay for it. But it is not worth the money due to how incompetently it is designed. Especially since it is mainly for researchers, it is odd how commercialised it is.

In many cases, it would make more sense to look through a stack of physical papers than to use the BNA. Sadly, microfilm is the next best alternative.

When i realised I had paid twice for the same thing Sophie immediately sorted it out and put my mind at ease

I received prompt and friendly service from Ryan helping me with a research project.

I live over in northwestern Canada. I was in touch with British Newspapers Archives with a very special request which related to Scottish family history which I have been doing for more than 25 years. I received a reply the next morning which was even more than I expected! I couldn't believe "Sophie's" response, so prompt, so cordial, and so generous!!! THANK-YOU!!!

My short experience with British Newspapers Archive have been a disappointment.
The use of AI seems to have corrupted many of the files I wanted to use. They appear as gibberish and unreadable.
When I selected a range of years to read the files do not appear in numerical order which wasted a lot of time.
Using a different provider to find the details of a search I get more content in the pages that I do with your archive.
I paid for 3 months and find that it has been a waste of my money as the Archive is just not helpful or informative.

Was offered a free trial of Newspaper pages 3 free with an extra 3 free but couldn't find them or any link

Simply CANNOT access the 3 free articles despoiire:
1. Registering
2. Speaking to Custiomner Services (Lovely young lady called nicole who tried to help - sending me all kinds of links which DID NOT help
Following advice
Re-trying

All to no avail.

SO frustrating as I really want the articles! Feel its a bit of a con, really.......

I am very frustrated as I have been a member for years on this site and now all of a sudden I cannot get into the site I am trying to change my password whatever I put in it isn't right. Has my sbscription finished and I haven't realise this how do you find out. If I cannot get this sorted please can I finish which is so disappointing as I have all my research with you I research for a cemetery in Redcar. For years I have not had any problems and have been very happy with the service.

Dealt with my problem quickly and efficiently

This is an invaluable source for my research.

It's not without fault as some of the scans are not legible or semi legible and it seems odd that there is no quality control on this, but perhaps they have to choose quantity over quality and would waste too much time reviewing and re-running those pages and may not be able to tweak the OCR software anyway to make it any better on a second run.

The most annoying aspect is that there is no advanced notice of what newspapers they plan to scan in the future. For those of us who also use reference libraries in person like the British Library this makes it harder to plan what we need to do at the libraries and what we can miss out on because we know it will come online in the future. Even a rough guide of what they hope to scan a year or two or even five in advance, even if they don't stick to those dates, would save a lot of valuable wasted time by in person visits to British Library. I have spent several visits at the British Library going through a newspaper that 6 months to a year later suddenly appears on the site unannounced in advance.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what titles they chose (perhaps sponsorship pr partnership is involved) but there must be some long term pecking order beyond what is going to be scanned in in the next couple of days.

I think it would also be nice if there was some user involvement in what titles are chosen. Whether they have any information from British Library about what the popular titles are I have no idea but if suggestions and voting on those suggestions were allowed then maybe we'd get a bit more of what people want. Very often the titles chosen seem like they would be of little interest to anyone.

Most of the bad reviews seem to be about auto renewal which I tend to agree with but it is easy to change this in your preferences by ticking a box to not auto renew.

Overall this has been a great project and so helpful to my research but clearer advance notice of titles would be very helpful.

I can not thank Joann enough for helping this past week retrieve my account to Britishnewspaperarchives.

Thanks to her, I now have access to my account and the many pages of newspaper that has helped me find my mother's family.
Thank you again for all your help
Kind Regards,

Arlene Gertsch

WorldPay constantly declines both PayPal payments and Credit Card payments without reason - even after both PayPal and bank apps declare the payments AUTHORISED. When you contact customer support, they ask for all of your credit card details in order to add them to an Authorised White List - nobody wants to give their credit card details to an unknown person in a customer service operation. Even though PayPal payments are declined by WorldPay, BritishNewspaperArchive continues to list PayPal as one of the two methods of payment. Nobody seems to oversee the management of the customer service agents who are asking for full credit card details for an "Authorised White List"...

This website is expensive more so because the auto-renewal is hard to avoid. The option to stop the subscription auto-renewing is not made clear at sign-up and is hard to find and use when it is needed. On top of that the company does not send out a timely warning of impending renewal and only sends out an email confirming that it has happened the day after it becomes impossible to stop it. This is unfair dealing and I would warn users to be careful about signing up.
Although the site has a wealth of information and I have found it useful, the OCR and search quality leaves a lot to be desired. I've come across articles containing my search text which have not been found and some results which have not been repeated. Also the limited search options make it hard to focus on certain topics.
OK but be very wary. Certainly try it in a library if you can before risking signing up to a subscription.

Be very careful using this resource which used to be feely available in libraries. It is very easy to get drawn in on a free search which leads you to a paywall. I thought I'd clicked on 8.99 to access a couple of reports but somehow got charged 99.99 which I can't afford. I asked for a refund but they have charged me for a whole month's use of 14.99. I used it for about half an hour. So not that happy.

Appalling Customer Service. Can't process my PayPal Pay As You Go payment. Already taken over a week to deal with the issue. Trying to blame PayPal but PayPal works every where else for me. Wildly expensive but they've bought out the rights to the old newspapers so you can't get them elsewhere. They have a monopoly on this and on the 1921 census. All designed to rip you off!!

Further to the above, British Newspaper Archive have still not fixed the issue! They are trying to blame PayPal, my browser settings and just about anything else they can think of!!!! I have ABSOLUTELY NO issues using PayPal for other transactions. The error message that is generated is a BNA error with a BNA message saying to contact BNA to get it fixed. Despite this, EVEN AFTER ANOTHER FULL WEEK OF TRYING, they have still failed to get this sorted. AVOID THIS LOT AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!

Auto-renewal scam. Beware.
Absolute disgrace: Just got my BNA subscription renewed for another 3 months, without being told in advance. Their auto-renewal policy requires you to proactively cancel the subscription.
On a side note: The whole BNA website is substandard. Most of the pre-1850 scanned material is literally unreadable. Poor quality. This raises real issues in terms of copyright.