The Newspaper Index is a catalogue of newspaper cuttings and articles held on microfilm in our local studies collections. The Index started as a project in Middleton Library in the 1980s; in the late 1990s we started transferring the data in the old card index to the searchable database that's part of the Community Resources Module of our Dynix library management system. As part of the NOF-funded digitisation project we worked on with Local Studies a few years ago we expanded the remit of the Index to include material from across the Borough and to make a special effort to get most of the original work online. At the moment there are just over eighty thousand entries. There is still a considerable way to go (especially as more articles are being added to the Local Studies collections every week).
The Newspaper Index is available online as part of our Web Catalogue. We've just updated some of the pre-set searches on the "Themes" page. This includes a new list of locality-based searches. These are searches for articles about places around the Borough (as opposed to articles that just mention locations in their text). It's early days yet for parts of the Borough as we're still catching up with 150 years or more of material.
If you're interested in seeing some of the other material derived from the digitisation project, have a look at the Link4Life web site.
No comments:
Post a Comment