The British Newspapers archive facility in Colindale north London )4 million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries being made available online Tuesday by the British Library(

Digitization and Scanning Operator Madhuri Joshi, bottom left, scans pages of a newspaper at the the British Library's British Newspapers archive facility in Colindale north London, Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. There are stories of war and famine, crime and punishment, alongside birth and death notices, family announcements and advertisements for soap, cocoa, marmalade, miracle cures and treatments for baldness. All to be found in 4 million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries being made available online Tuesday by the British Library, in what head of newspapers Ed King calls "a digital Aladdin's Cave" for researchers. The online archive is a partnership between the library and digital publishing firm Brightsolid, which has been scanning 8,000 pages a day from the library's vast periodical archive for the past year and plans to digitize 40 million pages over the next decade.