From today, 28 July, the National and University Library of Iceland will publish selected headlines from Icelandic newspapers of a hundred years ago on the website Tímarit.is, the Library’s Twitter page and the Facebook page of Tímarit.is, with the hashtag #FyrirÖld (“a century ago”). The idea is to draw attention to how important the Icelandic newspapers are as a mirror of their times. The headlines refer both to major news and to the everyday events the papers reported at the time.
Today it is a hundred years since the start of the carnage of the First World War. The Library will therefore look a whole century back in time, to 1914, which was an exceptionally eventful year: Eimskipafélag Íslands (the Icelandic Steamship Company) was founded that year, for example. After the murder of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and that declaration marked the beginning of the World War. Headlines from the newspapers’ reports will be brought out to recall the events of 1914. Selected headlines from Tímarit.is from #FyrirÖld will be posted on the Library’s Twitter and Facebook pages over the coming weeks, as well as appearing on the front page of Tímarit.is. Tímarit.is now also offers links to other newspapers published on the same day, so that the news in different papers can be compared.
Tímarit.is holds digitised copies of Icelandic newspapers and magazines from the earliest times to the present day. The website has proved an enormously important contribution to public debate in Iceland and has made research on Icelandic society of later centuries much easier. Tímarit.is is by far the most popular website the National and University Library of Iceland has ever run, with about three thousand visits a day on average.