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.
The site offers many search options, including a basic keyword search, advanced Boolean, guided Boolean, and natural language. All searches work well and return relevant results. There are extensive help files, which display topics based on where the user is in the database. Articles may be marked and saved from one search to the next and the durable links feature allows the user to save a particular result list. The user interface is straightforward and elegant, but meant for a large display monitor. Navigating the site on a small monitor can be frustrating. If Acrobat Reader is set to integrate into the browser, the user can end up with just a few inches of viewing space. Since the best feature of Historical Newspapers is the size and quality of the image, this can be a real drawback.
Historical Newspapers is an impressive product, and superior to its microfilm counterpart in the quality of the image, the ease of locating and using information, and accessibility. There are still some kinks to work out, and refinements to be made, but these are in the future. The price tag (which varies by library) is hefty, and many libraries already have a significant investment in their microfilm collection, but I believe the product well worth the price. Historical Newspapers is highly recommended for academic libraries and others with heavily used newspaper collections.
