British quality newspaper The Times have opened up their dusty but valuable archives of the past 200 years by officially launching The Times Archive today. Every newspaper published between 1785 and 1985 has been scanned and made fully searchable through an OCR program.
Nineteen months ago, Times Media’s digital publisher Zach Leonard told Journalism.co.uk that the company was looking at the possibility of building an archive of all its content. Turns out that Leonard wasn’t just trying to gain some goodwill but actually planned on digitalizing the archive. The beta version was launched only last month, so apparently the company has different guidelines than most web start-ups – who often seem to stay in beta mode forever.
For a limited period of time, the whole archive will be free. So enjoy it while you can. Read about the original Live Aid for example, or the Titanic or the assassination of Lincoln.
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