Datelines Of Old Now In Online Database

Avid readers of The New York Times looking to catch up on all the news that was fit to print in 1851 will have their hands full, now that Harvard’s online resources include articles from as far back as the nineteenth century.

In the last few months, ProQuest, a search engine for periodicals, has expanded its selection of articles from The Times and The Wall Street Journal to include digitized versions of papers from 1851 to 1999.

ProQuest—available to Harvard students through the Harvard Online Library Information System (HOLLIS) home page—plans to make over 70 million documents available.

“It’s very broad in value to research and scholarship,” said Jeffrey L. Horrell, associate librarian of Harvard College for collections.

For students in a History 98a junior tutorial research seminar on The Times, the ability to access historical articles without scouring through microfiche has been particularly useful.

“In terms of search features, it revolutionized being able to find things that you couldn’t find by browsing,” said Carrie R. Bierman ’04, a student in the tutorial. “With indexes, there is no way to search multiple words or a specific day.”

The digitizing process involved scanning the microfilm of the newspapers, making an image of each page and then “zoning out” on individual articles so that each article becomes its own searchable document, according to Dan R. Andreuzzi, assistant manager of ProQuest.

“What’s unique about historical news is that you’re not just searching full text. You can see what the story looked like on the page-it’s not just content, but context as well,” he said.

ProQuest plans to set up a separate database containing publications for which they have articles ranging from the 1800s to nearly present day, Andreuzzi said.

Older issues of publications that could be useful to researchers have yet to be digitized.

“It costs many millions of dollars because of the millions of pages, so we can’t digitize as much as we’d like,” Andreuzzi said. “We focus on the papers of historical significance and national importance.”

ProQuest has started to digitize old issues of The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.

It has also announced plans to incorporate The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times into the database.