Around 40 million pages from the national newspaper collection are to be digitised as part of a new project unveiled by the British Library and brightsolid.

The project will see three centuries' worth of newspaper articles from 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles put online as part of a 10-year deal between the library and the online publisher. It is hoped that the digitisation will help to safeguard the future of the British Library's newspaper archive, making the pages available on the internet and in the library's reading rooms.

A minimum of 4 million pages will be made available during the first two years, which will provide a boost for people wishing to access the collection without having to visit the library's North London site. British Library chief executive Dame Lynne Brindley said: "Historic newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, genealogists, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail.

"By making these pages fully searchable we will transform a research process which previously relied on scrolling through page after page of microfilm or print."