There's a time limited free (with registration) opportunity to search and view an archive of the London Times, the UK's paper of record, from 1785 to 1985 ... link.It isn't clear if this is a new digitization or another access point as The Times has been available in digitalized form for the same years through the Gale Group for some years.
In the UK many libraries offer their patrons remote online access, but very few do in Canada.
The site is promising that later years, after 1985, will also be digitized.
It's not the same as Gale. Running the same searches on Gale and on the Times' own product yield similar, but not identical, results.
ReplyDeleteGale's format and interface are also VASTLY superior to the clunky Times one. Yikes. The Times is running amateur hour here. If their interface were better, it would be a welcome addition: having TWO products to search is always better than one, since they are working from different scans, possibly different source material, using different OCR, and different accuracy standards and processing rules. Searching BOTH products may give you hits that one alone would miss.
What's really sad, though, is that you have to go to all these international newspaper search sites to do research on old Canadian news, hoping that correspondent accounts and wire stories will give you enough leads to go on. Where ARE the Canadian papers, anyway? Where ARE Canadian newspaper publishers and libraries? Stuck in the 19th century? Isn't Ottawa the tech capital of something or another? Which "tech"?