2013/07/01 by Adrian Bingham · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Digital and Traditional Archives Management
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/cet144
openalex publication_date 2013/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The Times, a self-proclaimed ‘paper of record’, has always had one eye on posterity, and it has worked hard to establish itself as a resource for scholars. It is the newspaper most commonly held in libraries around the country, and the production of a detailed index has for many years enabled historians to mine its content with greater precision than that of its rivals. It was quick into the digital game too: it was the first digital newspaper archive that many researchers used, and remains the one that is most widely available in university and public libraries. The previous version of the archive covered the paper’s first two hundred years, from 1785 to 1985; Gale Cengage has now produced an updated version, with a new interface, that includes content up to 2006. More than 6,500 issues, some 585,000 pages of content, have been added. The archive is a joy to use, among the best of its type. Reading, saving, and printing articles is straightforward, and it is simple to switch between the full page view and individual articles. The advanced search options are comprehensive, and one can focus on or exclude specific types of editorial content; searches can be easily saved across sessions and citations can now be generated automatically. The Times is part of Gale’s ever expanding Newsvault (featuring a range of major titles, such as the Financial Times, the Economist, and the Illustrated London News), and, for those institutions able to afford other digitised publications, it means that cross-title searching is possible; this really does open up possibilities for ambitious and wide-ranging programmes of research.