Times Online has rolled out an elaborate digital newspaper archive stretching back more than 200 years. The archive includes more than 20 miliion articles from every edition of the Times, bar a small number of damaged issues, from 1785 to 1985.
It includes the Thunderer's coverage of events such as the Battle of Waterloo, the first convicts arriving at Botany Bay and the execution of Marie Antoinette, the sinking of the Titanic. Other issues cover the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888 and Amelia Earhart's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932.
The archive also includes letters to the editor, photographs and adverts, with each page presented as it was printed in the paper on a parchment-coloured screen. Anne Spackman, the editor-in-chief of Times Online, said that the Times wanted the project to set the gold standard for an online newspaper archive for 'arguably the most famous newspaper in the world'. The archive is currently free, and Spackman says no decision will be taken about whether it will remain free or require a subscription until it has generated a solid user base.
Pages are scanned using 'optical character recognition technology', which means articles can be tagged and searched more easily. More than 150 topic pages, such as 'war and revolution', are designed to make content easier to search.
For me, the interesting articles are the coverage of Crime in the UK over the years - Jack the Ripper, the Moors Murders, the Kray Twins, the Great Train Robbery and then from the USA, the Gang Feuds in Chicago and the arrest of Al Capone.
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