Friday 19 June 2009

British bonanza

The British Library has unveiled its new 19th century newspaper archives project providing free and paid access to more than two million pages from 49 London, national and regional newspapers.

British Newspapers 1800-1900 allows online archive searchers to select an outcome that includes free access to content, not just results that require payment.

Only in Great Britain? Pity.

The Toronto Star's Pages of the Past is a paid archives search service for the newspaper covering 110 years, but we are not aware of any multi-publication newspaper search services in Canada.

We would pay for access to all of the pages of the Toronto Sun from Day One in '71, and the Toronto Telegram, and the Globe and Mail etc.

4 comments:

  1. I think PoP is free if you have a TO public library card.

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  2. The Globe's archives search is also free with a Toronto library card. Doing research that involves a lot of digging through old papers, I often wish that there was a similar service for the Tely/Sun.

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  3. York University has a teeny tiny number of Toronto Telegram photos online. Sadly, not well done at all. Nowhere near what it could be.

    Scanning many, many decades of work is possible only if you are Google or Microsoft. Otherwise, would it make sense to have a number of students do it as a summer job? But again, it would be almost an impossible task.

    Years ago, Library and Archives Canada requested to take possession of (at least) the Tely's photo archives. Plan was to make it freely available to all, including online through the Collections Canada web site. Sun Media refused.

    Currently the Tely archives are located...????

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  4. Toronto Star and Globe archives are available if you have a library card from many public and university libraries across Canada.
    Google purchased Cold North Wind, the Ottawa company which produced the Star's Pages of the Past a year or so back and is currently digitizing a lot of North American newspapers's archives. I even saw some stuff from the Mail and Empire on a recent search.
    The Toronto Sun, at one point, was at the forefront of digitizing its work. Back in the early 90's, one could buy an annual CD of The Toronto Sun

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