The University of Pennsylvania's Online Computing Magazine
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March 1992 - Volume 8:6 [Printout | Contents | Search ]
By Bob Walther Print newspapers have played a major part in information dissemination almost since their inception 500 years ago. National and international news, local events and organizations, sports, food, business, travel, real estate, obituaries, and arts performances all receive attention in the modern newspaper. The Van Pelt Library has recently acquired two Philadelphia newspapers as full-text databases on CD-ROM-one from the earliest years of the city, The Pennsylvania Gazette; the other its current newspaper of record, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Philadelphia Inquirer CDThe Inquirer database includes the complete text of the newspaper from 1987 to the present. The CD is updated quarterly. Because of the magnitude of information, each year appears on a separate disk. The search software allows users to access the text either through an easy- to-use menu system or through the Dialog command protocols already familiar to many online searchers. "Full text," however, does not quite mean "facsimile"; missing from the CD version are all images (photos, drawings, maps, etc.) and certain kinds of non-article text, such as advertising matter, stock quotes, sports box scores, and calendar listings. Still, there is an enormous amount of information-every news and feature story (including wire stories) from every section of the paper. The CD-ROM indexes many different fields within each record, including headline, byline, publication date, section heading, lead paragraph, length of record, caption, and article type. And, of course, every single word in every article is searchable free text with Boolean qualifiers.
The Pennsylvania Gazette CDThe Pennsylvania Gazette is one of the most important sources chronicling life in the American Colonies during the eighteenth century. It was published here in Philadelphia as a weekly from 1728 until 1815, and was edited by Benjamin Franklin from 1728 through 1750, the period covered in the CD release now available at Van Pelt Reference. The CD offers a full-text transcription of The Gazette, including advertisements, announcements, and shipping notices, searchable using keyword Boolean techniques. For each item retrieved, a digitized image of the actual newspaper page as it originally appeared may also be called up on the screen. Soon Van Pelt plans to add the capability to print these images via laser printer. With this CD, searchers can quickly access all the minutiae of daily life that a weekly newspaper in colonial Philadelphia would document. The producers, Accessible Archives (located in Malvern, PA), are working on further releases to extend the coverage of The Gazette up to 1800.
BOB WALTHER is Online Services Coordinator, Reference Department, Van Pelt Library.
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