While visiting the UK National Archives on Thursday I attended a presentation by Philip Abbot from the Royal Armouries, Leeds, on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's campaign for better armour for soldiers in the First World War.
I was struck by the use Abbot had made of evidence from digitized newspapers, and not just those from the UK. Trove, the Australian newspaper digitization project and the corresponding project in New Zealand also provided sources.
No Canadian newspapers were mentioned. When will Canadian libraries, most notably LAC, stop handicapping history studies and rectify years of neglect of digitization of Canadian newspapers?
4 comments:
I'm considering getting a subscription to an historic newspaper service. Which do you feel gives the best coverage of Canadian newspaper? I need Western Canada: Winnipeg Manitoba to Alberta + BC papers primarily. Thanks!
As an Australian I have made a lot of use of Trove. It is a magic source of all sorts of information up to 1955. There are so many newspaper banners now digitised you can get such wonderful background information on people and places, history and social history ... all for free. If you have any connections in Australia or NZ then go for it. Easy to use too.
Canada should take a close look at it. Our Librarians at the National Library were apparently the driving force. The internet is all about information, and what is better than a reporters view. Some current reporters with their opinions and slants could learn from reading work done by their predessors. Wonderful reports of weddings and obituaries you rarely, if ever, see today.
It's sad that Canada lacks similar digitisation of newspapers. Having been researching for decades pre-Trove, I appreciate even more how Trove has opened up those human stories that would have been lost to families. Pre-Trove (before 2003 or so), we could only find the standard fare of weddings and funerals and perhaps follow up clues from archive discoveries. I truly believe that Trove is a world leader at a number of important levels: crowd sourcing of corrections, the ability to tag no make lists, the breadth of newspapers that have been scanned, the highlighting of the relevant words, and it's free! I guess they also mentioned Papers Past, the New Zealand version?
Here Here !
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