Times to End Charges on Web Site (via NY Times)
Two years and it’s over.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

Now to the archives:
+ All content from 1987-Present will Now be, Free
+ Public Domain Material from 1851 to 1922, Free
+ There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Of course, many libraries offer this content via one of several databases. Historical material (back to 1851) has been part of the The New York Times Historic database from ProQuest. Many libraries offer it at no charge but unfortunately many users don’t know it’s available and available remotely. It will be interesting to see how ProQuest positions this product but also the other newspapers they have digitized back to Vol. No. 1. A list can be accessed here.

One plus for ProQuest and others might be the numerous access points that they provide, the ability to browse, etc. since free-text searching can be a challenge when a person enters a a few terms or a name. Articles from the same index have been available for $4.95 and like the library product as PDF files.

The NY Times has made available some “archival content” for free for many years. Examples include both theater reviews (selected reviews back to 1900) and book reviews (back to 1981).

Time Magazine is another major publication that makes its complete archive available (as ASCII text) at no charge.

See Also: The Chronicling America Program from the Library of Congress is digitizing newspapers. So far, over 300K of pages have been digitized. The goal is to have papers from 1900-1910 digitized with information about newspapers back to 1690. Free.

See Also: NewspaperArchive.com and their many free collections (offering thousands of pages of free content).

See Also: Don’t Forget that Most of the Entire NewspaperArchive.com is Available for free to K-12 Schools and Public Libraries.
The complete database offers nearly 73 million digitized pages from 754 Cities over 239 Years. 2,835 Titles.

UPDATE: Much More From Barbara Quint in this InfoToday NewsBreak

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 1:39 am and is filed under Information Industry, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.