Legal Research

A Century of British Newspapers Online

By Simon Fodden

The British Library has made two million pages from forty-nine mostly regional 19th century newspapers available online. There’s a search function that does an adequate job of locating your terms within the scanned-in pages, though because of the quality of much of the type and the imaging, it’s less than perfect. (I did the, for me, obvious search on my last name, which is sufficiently uncommon to make the inquiry worthwhile: wound up with a great number of hits on the word “sudden” because the “s” was often a long ’s’ — the one that looks like an ‘f’ — and the ‘u’ was frequently muddy enough to be taken for an ‘o’.)

Most of the pages are behind a paywall: £7 for a 24 hour pass with a limit of 100 articles or £10 for a seven day pass with a limit of 200 articles. But the scans of the Penny Illustrated Paper and The Graphic are free; and where the articles are protected, you are able to view a few words of context in a nifty popup in order to judge whether the result is something you want to purchase.

There’s obviously an almost unlimited wealth of material in this resource, though little perhaps of direct use to practising lawyers in Canada. Still, history has a way of making itself important in the most unexpected ways, so this is a resource to add to the “someday…perhaps” list. But there’s nothing to stop you enjoying yourself right now on your own dime, of course. There are over 145 thousand hits on “barrister,” for example; half a million on “Canada”; and then there’d be the War of 1812 — 217 hits on “war” and “Canada” in the year 1812.

The illustration above, by the way, is of the famous tightrope walker Blondin, doing his thing in the Crystal Palace on October 7, 1861. (In 1859 he crossed Niagara Falls, cooking and eating an omelette half way.) It’s from a cover of an issue of the Penny Illustrated.

[via ResearchBuzz]

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 06, 2009 (boomark / email).