I recently completed a ‘Continuous Education’ course at Liverpool University. The course was run by Dr. Nick Foggo, and was titled ‘Exploring Liverpool’s Historic Newspapers and Periodicals‘. The course ran for 5 Mondays consecutively, starting on 27/05-27/03/2017. Nick and his team run a WP blog, to supplement the learning experience.

Although I didn’t know quite what to expect when I attended for the first week, as I was more interested in the social history of Liverpool, through research of early newspapers of the day, rather than, what the course actually was about. However, during the course, it did go in to other aspects of Liverpool Newspapers, which I hadn’t thought of, thus opening new aspects for me to explore, and the initial progress on these matters, has been rewarding thus far.

The course started with the first recorded Liverpool Newspaper of 1712, called the ‘Liverpool Courant‘ and progressing to the Liverpool Mercury and up to 1900, with a vast array of various Liverpool papers in between… funnily enough, more of the early newspapers and periodicals survive, as although the paper of older copies disintegrate over time, the even earlier productions, were made on a linen type paper, so don’t deteriorate like the paper versions.

As a group we looked at how to research Newspapers on line, and I quickly discovered that the best website for this was ‘The British Newspaper Archive‘ so I am still toying with the idea of subscribing… what makes me hesitant, is that only a few of the Liverpool editions have been digitised, and they mainly cover the World War years.

However… the burning question is… What course do I take next… lol.