The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855–2000

If the future for newspapers is digital, so too is the past. Gale’s digitisation of the archives of the Daily Telegraph, encompassing one million pages from the first issue in June 1855 to December 2000, turns yet another major newspaper into a source of historical data. Few significant national and local newspapers—the Sun and the News of the World are the obvious exceptions—have resisted the digital turn, and scholars have flocked to the resulting databases to find information on any number of topics. Gale are well attuned to the needs of their users, and have produced a platform that is intuitive and easy to use, but also allows searches of some sophistication. Reading, saving and printing is straightforward, as is switching between viewing full pages or individual articles. For those searching for specific things, it is possible to select different types of content, including ‘News’, ‘Features’, ‘Editorial and Commentary’, and ‘Advertising’. Recognising the interest in big data approaches, Gale have also incorporated the ability to visualise term frequency and term clusters when searching the archive: these tools make it very easy for researchers to display the findings of their content analyses in an attractive and accessible format. The well-known limitations of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology ensure that the numbers produced by these searches must be treated cautiously, but they will doubtless be widely used, and an initial impression of the archive suggests that the accuracy is fairly good. These facilities are considerably enhanced, moreover, by the capability not only to cross-search Gale’s other digitised newspapers and magazines—including The Times, the Daily Mail and the Economist—but also wider collections of primary sources, such as Archives Unbound and Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Of course, many libraries and universities will not be able to afford the subscription costs to be able to take full advantage of this potential, and the bewildering array of digital possibilities makes decisions about the spending of available funds increasingly difficult. Should it be the Daily Telegraph or the Illustrated London News? The Listener or Picture Post

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics · Information retrieval · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Sophistication · Term (time · World Wide Web · American History and Culture · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · History · Law