Today, Google announced its free news archive search –http://news.google.com/archivesearch
News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. In addition to helping you search, News archive search can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods.
Search results include both free content–from such sources as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian–and fee-based content–from such sources as Washington Post Archives, Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives.
Those timelines are way cool! So is the ability to trace a news story back through the decades. A student investigating events in the Middle East might search for stories relating to Israel’s beginnings in 1948.
Result pages identify key time periods and publications on the left of the page. The advanced news archive search allows users to filter by date, source, and price.
Note: recently Time Magazine converted most of its archive to fulltext http://www.time.com/time/archive/
Also note: Many fortunate schools (like ours) have even richer archives of contemporaneous news–for instance in ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Facts On File, and other databases.
Linking to resources like Time and Google News Archive will help provide some degree of equity while we lobby for all learners to have access to quality databases.
