By: E&P Staff The New York Times announced this week the creation of TimesMachine -- a new addition to the paper's digital archive that reaches all the way back to the Times' first issue on Sept. 18, 1851, and continues through Dec. 31, 1922.
TimesMachine is available free of charge, and only to Times home-delivery subscribers.
The creation of TimesMachine follows the experiment that was TimesSelect, the premium content service that required a fee to access the Gray Lady's most popular features, including news and opinion columns, the archives, and the crossword puzzle.
TimesSelect was ended on Sept. 19, 2007. In November, Derek Gottfrid, author of ?Open,? the Times? in-house technology blog, announced in a post, ?The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge.?
Articles dating from 1923-1986 will still be available at a premium. The Times recommends that readers searching for those articles ?ask [their]
local librarian for access to Proquest?s Digital Vault,? advice which also applies to non-home subscribers who wish to view TimesMachine.
?These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper,? Gottfrid wrote back in November. ?In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work -- each article is actually composed of numerous smaller TIFF images that need to be scaled and glued together in a coherent fashion.?
Non-home subscribers who would like to see a sample of TimesMachine can check it out
here. It features the pages of the Times for the following events: The sinking of the Titanic, the armistice ending World War I, the death of President Abraham Lincoln, and the founding of the League of Nations, as well as the papers first-ever issue from 1851.
To read Derek Gottfrid?s account of the creation of TimesMachine, go to the ?Open? blog,
here.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here