About this website
Inked in Time is a website devoted to unearthing forgotten tales of Malmesbury’s people and places, through the faded newsprint and timeworn texts of days gone by.
About the content of this website
The content of this website is researched and created from digital images of archive newspapers.
Copyright on the articles
According to this page:
- The copyright on unsigned newspaper text expires 70 years after publication.
- The copyright on signed newspaper text expires 70 years after the death of the author.
It’d be great if it was possible to share images of the newspaper articles, but it isn’t. Although the copyright on the articles themselves has expired, somebody owns the copyright on the scans.
Faithfulness of the transcriptions on this site
Where this website shares a transcription of a newspaper article, sometimes minor changes are made for the purposes of consistency and readability. The changes don’t affect meaning. For example:
- Fixing obvious typographic errors — in older newspaper print, it’s much more common to find a wrong letter printed. Where that’s spotted, it gets fixed.
- Fixing obvious misspellings — it’s common to find five newspapers that refer to somebody by one spelling of their name, and another using something entirely different. Where that’s spotted, it gets fixed.
- Making things consistent — some newspapers might refer to Mr. Smith, where others refer to Mr Smith, and things like that. Where that’s spotted, it gets fixed, but only once a decision is made around what’s right and what isn’t, which could take some time.
- Expanding/replacing unusual/archaic abbreviations — newspapers often used terms like inst or instant (this month) and ult or ultimo (previous month) or &c (etcetera). Those get converted to modern English.
- Introducing paragraphs and other design features to make the articles more accessible — in instances where an article is long, sometimes it will be broken up, for ease of reading. Other design features such as images or pull quotes will sometimes be added to make articles more visually appealing, engaging, and easy to navigate.
In short, this view is taken: This site would feel much more authentic if images of the articles could be used. They can’t. Because that authenticity is already lost, if readability can be improved by fixing an obvious misprint or misspelling, or replacing very archaic terms with something more modern, that gain should be made.