NEWSPLAN West Midlands

History and Society Through Local Newspapers
in the West Midlands

Newspaper Use Surveys

Users of national and local newspapers in libraries and record offices have been questioned across all the NEWSPLAN regions in order to discover their reasons for consulting newspapers, the types of subjects being researched and the distance travelled to view the papers.

The first survey in the West Midlands was carried out in the autumn of 2001 and found that two-thirds of respondents had travelled less than 20 miles, 49% were looking at regional papers and nearly 7 out of 10 were consulting papers between 20-100 years old.

Unsurprisingly, significant numbers of people were using newspapers to help with local history (26%) and family history research (19%). However, newspapers contain a great diversity of subject matter and reasons for use are similarly varied. Broadly similar numbers (around 1 in 10) were researching each of the following: politics, obituaries, business/financial, advertisements, pictures, legal/crime and sport.

Repeat usage is high, demonstrating the ongoing appeal of newspapers as a resource and it is hoped that future developments in the use of automated indexing systems may enable even greater access and exploitation.

It is likely that there will be further newspaper use surveys at intervals in the future.

For a full set of the regional survey results of the 10 NEWSPLAN regions of the UK click on www.bl.uk/concord/linc/newsplan.html

Content © NEWSPLAN WM 2008
Searching Software © V3FM Ltd 2012