The digitisation project, which started last year, will take 10 years to complete, with a total of 650 million articles on 40 million web pages expected to be in the finished archive by 2020. British company Brightsolid, which also owns Friends Reunited and Genes Reunited, is responsible for digitising the archive - a painstaking process as much of it needs to be done by hand as so many of the pages of the newspapers are too fragile to be processed by machines.