The Illustrated London News — that venerable newspaper that is still technically publishing, albeit very rarely — has published something.

They have put their entire archive from the Great War on a public website for the first time.

Picture No. 10610824Although people have been able to buy old copies of the ILN, or there is a complete archive available to academics, there has never been a archive made available to the general public.

The Illustrated London News was awarded £96,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in April 2014 to create a free-to-access website, which will host the digitised wartime magazine pages of one of the world’s most iconic magazine archives and rare pictorial material.

One can only hope that releasing this four year block of newspaper articles will encourage the newspaper to release more of its content via the medium of the internet.

The first-phase website includes the digitised pages from the Illustrated London News 1914-1918, a wealth of editorial features providing rich context for the source material, a timeline, a range of topical insights from ‘Animals and War’ and ‘Trench Life’ to ‘Sport and the War’ and a blog written by young historians appointed for the project.

In coming months 70,000 digitised pages of ILN’s sister publications, including The Illustrated War News, The Sphere, The Sketch, The Tatler, The Bystander, The Graphic and The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News will be added to the website.

The ILN has also published a one-off magazine, The Illustrated First World War, in partnership with The Royal British Legion. Now on sale in newsagents, a donation from every copy sold is made to Royal British Legion.

www.illustratedfirstworldwar.com

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3 comments
  1. Andrew says:

    Nice for it to be accessible, but they seem to be claiming copyright on everything.

    • ianvisits says:

      At 100 years old, most of it will still be under copyright.

      That’s why my use of the ILN copies I own always tend to be more than a hundred years old to avoid that problem.

  2. Andrew says:

    Well, unsigned works should be out of copyright after 70 years. Copyright for works with attribution is be life plus 70 years, so they should be out of copyright if the author (artist, photographer, etc) died in 1943 or earlier. For example, http://www.illustratedfirstworldwar.com/richard-caton-woodville/ or http://www.illustratedfirstworldwar.com/frederic-villiers-1852-1922/

    Of course, as somone scanned the works, they could claim copyright in the scans (“sweat of the brow”).

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