Britishnewspaperarchive Opiniones 

It appears that any complaint regarding the recent downgrade to the BNA site is met by an AI generated response pointing towards a 'blog' giving the reasons for the changes. I can't speak on behalf of other subscribers, but the 'reasons' for the changes are of no particular interest to me as a user, my only interest is in the 'result' of those changes. For me the result is that BNA is unusable for my method of research, for BNA the result is another lost subscriber. Who wins? What manner of business model is that?

I am absolutely furious and deeply disappointed with the recent changes to the British Newspaper Archive website.

The new interface is far less user-friendly and has turned what was previously a straightforward and efficient research tool into something unnecessarily complicated, time-consuming and confusing.

The new search function in particular is ridiculously overcomplicated and, in my experience, simply does not work properly. Previously, searching was quick and intuitive. You could enter specific search terms using inverted commas to find exact words or phrases, then easily use the sidebar to narrow down the results. It was simple, flexible and efficient.

Now, instead of being able to carry out a straightforward search, you are required to fill in multiple boxes and work through a far more complicated process. Even worse, the "exact search" function does not appear to return accurate results. Searches that should be simple and precise produce irrelevant or inaccurate results, meaning you have to spend even more time trying to find information that was previously easy to locate. A search function is one of the most fundamental parts of a research website, and the new system feels unnecessarily complicated and, frankly, not functional.

As if that wasn't bad enough, you have made it clear you do not care about your customers AT ALL, this is shown in the way saved articles and bookmarks have been handled.

Over a considerable amount of time, I carefully saved and organised articles relating to family history. I labelled bookmarks and assigned them to different family lines so that I could easily identify who each article related to and why I had saved it. This was an important part of my research and represented many hours of careful organisation.

Those carefully organised records now appear to have been reduced to a meaningless list of newspaper pages, with zero information linking them to the person, family line, event or time period they relate to. I am now faced with a pointless long list of saved newspapers 'my records' and I have no idea who or what any of them apply to because the only information provided is the name of the newspaper - that is it!!!

This has destroyed the organisational system I spent countless hours creating. It is not simply an inconvenience — it has made my previous research null and void. All that time and money spent for nothing.

I cannot understand how such a major redesign could be implemented without preserving users' carefully created labels, categories and organisational information. For a website aimed at historical and genealogical research, where users may spend years building collections of material, this is an incredibly damaging oversight and shows just how little regard you have for your customers.

The new website feels like a significant step backwards. The interface is confusing and time consuming, the search system is unnecessarily complicated and inaccurate, and valuable functionality that made the site useful for serious research appears to have been removed.

I have been a loyal paying subscriber for nearly 10 years, but I am so disappointed and frustrated by these changes that I will not be renewing my subscription when my current term expires unless the site is significantly improved or reverted back to the way it was. After almost a decade of loyalty, it is incredibly frustrating to see a service I once found invaluable become so unusable.

The new British Newspaper Archive website update has ruined the research workflow. BNA has completely removed the sidebar that showed search result counts by decade at a glance. Instead of instantly seeing when a historical event peaked and drilling down by year/month, we are now forced to filter completely blindly. A task that took three seconds now takes twenty minutes of guesswork and endless page reloads.

As a paying subscriber, this platform "upgrade" is a massive step backward for genealogists and researchers. Please restore the classic sidebar filter and stop breaking core search tools! #BritishNewspaperArchive #Genealogy #FamilyHistory

Joanna quickly and effectively resolved an issue I had with my subscription.

They’ve wrecked a perfectly good site, ignored every warning from long‑term subscribers, and rolled out a system that is slower, clunkier, and far harder to use. Years of saved research have been reduced to useless lists, search results are now unreliable, and basic navigation takes twice as long.

The worst part?
They clearly don’t care. The replies to reviews are copy‑paste corporate apologies that never address the actual problems — exactly what you’d expect from a service that knows users have no alternative. When you’re the only large‑scale digitised British newspaper archive, you can degrade the product and still expect people to pay.

I’ve subscribed for 8 years, but I won’t be renewing.
Until BNA stops acting like a monopoly and actually listens to the people who fund it, this “upgrade” will remain one of the most damaging decisions they’ve ever made.

The new format is dreadful - it just doesn't work. Previously the site was not particularly good but it was passable. In its current form it is simply unusable. After 5 or 6 years of subscribing, I shall not be renewing.

I find the site almost unusable since the change to the GUI. I assume the thought they were modernising it but instead it made it so counter intuitive.
It is so bad that I no longer enjoy even trying to find what I am looking for with the new search procedure. I have been with them on annual subscription for a few years now but I WILL NOT BE RENEWING!

Another dissatisfied customer. The new interface is much fiddlier to use and the unreliability of the OCR means most of its flashy new features are largely pointless and no improvement on the previous clear and uncluttered approach.

The date filter makes it much harder to compare frequency of term usage over time: much harder to set up and harder / slower to do structured sampling .

The new clipping system has the advantage of giving the date of the paper but not the page number which is obscured (on the iPad at least) by other text. And clipping itself takes more time while the necessity of clicking twice to find the relevant heading rather than accepting the last-used ‘bookmark’ as the default slows things up.

Useful features from eg the Gale databases of allowing a seamless move from one hit to the next or seeing the text in context at a glance have been incorporated.

It’s hard to believe that they sought any input at any stage from users - especially historians.

When it came to updating payment details, I wasn't able to do this online, which I was surprised at. However, I contacted the archive by email and Joanna dealt very quickly and efficiently with my query. Thank you, Joanna!

56% of reviewers giving one star and an embarrassing overall score of 2.3. A total collapse since the new system was introduced and no one is listening.

I experienced a problem which was completely my own fault. Sophie sorted things out for me very quickly - she worked out what I had done wrong and corrected it.

It could be a bit easier....

oohhhhh just seen that i can no longer look at clippings without subscription! it all becoming cleaerer is it greed? a national asset turned into money making scheme... ill come back if you just go back to the old system listen to your users please!!!!!!

The British Newspaper Archive: Progress Marches Backwards

I have used the British Newspaper Archive for years and regarded it as one of the finest resources available to anyone interested in local history. It contained millions of pages of material and, more importantly, provided a reasonably straightforward means of finding them.

Someone has now apparently decided that this was a problem.

The recently redesigned website represents an impressive attempt to take a simple research tool and introduce as many additional stages, menus, filters and opportunities for bewilderment as modern technology permits. Searching, formerly a fairly painless business involving such obscure concepts as choosing a newspaper, entering a date and typing a word, has now acquired something of the atmosphere of applying for planning permission.

Particularly impressive is the treatment of saved research. Historians, notoriously unreasonable people, have a tiresome habit of wanting to know where they found things. Some subscribers accumulated thousands of carefully saved articles, bookmarks and notes. The new system appears determined to cure them of this dependency. Finding old material can now constitute a rewarding historical investigation in its own right.

Other useful features have either vanished or been rendered sufficiently difficult to find that one begins to appreciate the experiences of archaeologists searching for lost civilisations.

The search system deserves special praise. Where once it was possible to narrow results quickly, users now report wrestling with numerous filters, drop-down boxes and results which are less precise than before. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate feature for a newspaper archive: by the time you locate the article you wanted, it has itself become considerably more historic.

The saddest aspect is that none of this was necessary. The old site was not glamorous, but it worked. Researchers generally prefer functioning databases to exciting interfaces. We are simple creatures. Give us a date box, a newspaper title and a search button and we can amuse ourselves for hours.

Judging by the quantity of similar complaints elsewhere, I am clearly not undergoing this character-building exercise alone. Long-standing subscribers are talking about cancelling, while people accustomed to computers are assuring the BNA that the difficulty is not an elderly inability to cope with change. This must be disappointing to anyone hoping to dismiss the complaints on the grounds that historians have only recently abandoned quill pens.

There are positives. The underlying newspaper collection remains magnificent, and reports suggest that the customer-service staff are helpful and courteous. Unfortunately, requiring excellent customer service because customers can no longer satisfactorily operate the website is rather like employing an exceptionally pleasant lifeboat crew after drilling holes in the ship.

The British Newspaper Archive has spent years preserving the past. Its latest achievement appears to be demonstrating that the previous version of its own website should also have been preserved.

Please bring it back.

If I could give this “0” I would, they’ve absolutely ruined a brilliant resource that I loved using daily, I have held a subscription for 5 years, I won’t be renewing, no chance. Searching on the site has become almost impossible.. it’s Laborious, clunky and train wreck compared to what it used to be. Advice to BNA, change it back.

Used to think this was a great site (I worked in IT for many years and found this site excellent - well presented). It is now a total shambles. Not sure if I will be subscribing again. Who did you get to do the upgrade - if it was external contractors I suggest it is time to go elsewhere. Time to wake up and listen to your customers. Put it back as it was or you will be losing a lot of subscribers - and money. Take notice ansd admit the upgrade was a costly mistake!!

Given the simplistic searching of the old system I cannot understand why they have now made it virtually impossible to use.

Simply pick region, dates, newspaper has been replaced with a system I cannot grasp or understand, & given the years of research I've carried out, i thought id quickly get to grips with it.
I do not understand why these organisations continually want to remake the wheel.

I cant & will not renew my decade long subscription.

I have no idea how a company could make such a mess of a perfectly functioning website. I agree with everyone else's scores here and would give it a zero if I could. Since the "upgrade" the site is unusable. Even if you can actually get into the home page, the UI is not user friendly and has obviously skipped any in depth beta testing before launching this upon an unsuspecting public. Poor form all around.

The changes that have been made to the BNA website are absymal! I have spent a lot of money subscribing to your services as they were the best. But these recent changes to the websites UI have made it impossible to navigate. I would warn the team responsible for this update that the people complaining aren't just people of an older generation who "dislike change" or "Struggle with newer tech". I am 32, I grew up with computers, websites and apps and I find this over simplification of a deisgn disastrous.

I've poured so much of my time and my money into researching my family history, I have so many articles saved. Articles that I could quickly look back at and remember basic information like the newspaper name and the date published. But somehow that's all gone now and all my bookmarked articles are reduced to a simple newspaper headline that might not even be relevant to why I saved that page. I need to have sources listed and organised otherwise EVERYONE'S research is useless. Given that BNA is based on archiving history, you should know how important those details are!!

Give us back the old website UI. This update is better suited for app users maybe. But for those of us who use it on desktop it's totally unfair. I specifically do not use Find My Past because they have exatly the same UI design and it's wholly unsuited for in depth research.

I used to love the BNA website, but the recent "improvements" are terrible. An enjoyable and rewarding research pass time has now, sadly, become a chore.
The new search options are far too complicated, and the results are not as accurate as the old website. I've tried using my keywords in each of the myriad of fields but none seem to work as before. I'm pretty savvy with computers but this interface is baffling.
And why so many time-consuming drop-down options?
The user interface is just not logical anymore.
The incredibly useful 'new and upcoming newspapers' link is gone too.
Unless the old (and very reliable) search parameters and simple menu options are replicated, I will, sadly, not be renewing my subscription.