ProQuest Historical Newspapers

E Day - Reference Reviews, 2002 - emerald.com
E Day
Reference Reviews, 2002emerald.com
The new Historical Newspapers database from ProQuest is a wonder of technology. It
contains full‐text and full‐image articles from newspapers dating back to 1850. Historical
Newspapers currently covers The New York Times from 1851‐1855 and 1975‐1977, and
The Wall Street Journal beginning in 1985 and working backwards into the 1880s. The goal
is comprehensive coverage of both of these titles, as well as other major newspapers. The
newspapers are searchable by both article citation and article text. This includes …
The new Historical Newspapers database from ProQuest is a wonder of technology. It contains full‐text and full‐image articles from newspapers dating back to 1850. Historical Newspapers currently covers The New York Times from 1851‐1855 and 1975‐1977, and The Wall Street Journal beginning in 1985 and working backwards into the 1880s. The goal is comprehensive coverage of both of these titles, as well as other major newspapers. The newspapers are searchable by both article citation and article text. This includes advertisements, obituaries, sports pages, essentially the entire issue from cover to cover. The displays are in PDF format with an underlay of ASCII text, which allows for full‐text searching. The images are amazingly clear, and the printout quality makes microfilm printing seem shameful (and there are obviously not the storage and preservation issues as with microfilm).
Search results are returned with three view options: extended citation, article view, and page map view. The article view returns a large, sharp PDF image of just the selected article. The page map view returns a thumbnail image of the entire page on which the article appeared. This is larger than what you might expect from a “thumbnail”, but it is still too small to read on the screen. From the page view, the user can move through each page of the issue by using either forward and back options or a jump‐to page option. The complete titles of individual articles appear as mouse text, while moving the arrow over the page and a click of the mouse take the user back to an article view. A PDF image of the page is also available, making it possible to print the entire page.
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