Reading today’s article in The Guardian about Times Online offering its digital newspaper archive for free, inspired me to go and check it out for myself.
One of the items I stumbled across from a cursory search in “crime”? under the topics menu was this letter to The Times editor dated 1888 on the Jack the Ripper case.
I’m not sure what’s more mind boggling ““ the time it must have taken to digitally archive over 20 million articles from the last 200 years (the archives currently date back to 1785), or the fact that the service is available to Times Online subscribers for free.
It’s great this sort of content is available to people to access for free, and similar moves were made by the BBC to archive their TV back catalogue this week.
I guess only time will tell as to whether it will permanently be available without a charge, but it made for a fascinating read as I resisted the lure of Facebook and Twitter for ten minutes to go and check something else out instead.
Great stuff!
