Future News?

I came across an announcement today for a project out of Google Labs, called Living Stories. It'a an "experiment" between Google, the NYT and the Washington Post to re-present news content for a 21st century audience and in a 21st century medium.

The FAQs (also linked from the bottom of the screen) offer interesting additional information. Clicking on a link from the Living Stories page, though, reveals where the product is going in terms of personalization and other features. Very cool.

And in certain ways, we're back to the future. Google has incorporated into real-time reporting some of the features that Facts.com already offers for historical news (i.e., Recently Deceased or No-Longer-Living Stories).

Never on Sunday

I found out the hard way that the Times Digital Archive (Times of London, 1785-1985) does not include any Sunday issues. The main search screen does not mention this fact, and even includes Sunday dates in its dropdown menu. But there is no indexing or content available for those dates; users wanting articles from the Sunday Times before July 1985 will need to use microfilm at Widener. After July 1, 1985, all issues of the Times of London (including Sundays) are available in Lexis-Nexis under the memorable title "Times (London), The."

Newspaper directories

A thesis writer in on Friday asked where she could find out which newspapers in a given year (in her case, 1915-1920 or so) were most popular in particular U.S. cities. She was aware of our Proquest Historical Newspapers; her interest was in the smaller, local dailies (or weeklies), however. She was glad to know about the the Widener newspaper collection list, of course, but it only gives titles and runs of Harvard library holdings and nothing about the "context" or influence of these papers. Because she is gauging popular reception of DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, she wanted to canvass black newspapers in these cities as well.

After poking a bit in HOLLIS and scratching my head, I uncovered (and then remembered having been told once before about) the N. W. Ayer and Son's Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals.

Ayer's (1869-1919) is now available online, in PDF format, through the LOC's Newspaper & Current Periodicals Reading Room.

A bit of further bibliographic history:

Rowell's American Newspaper Directory came first and it published annually from 1869-1908. Ayer's started in 1880 as a competitor; in 1909, it absorbed Rowell's.

In 1970, there came the first of several more title changes: Ayer Directory, Newspaper, Periodials, and Trade Publications (1970 -1971), Ayer Directory (1972-1982), IMS Ayer Directory of Publications (1983-1985), IMS Directory of Publications (1986).

In 1987, the name changed to Gale's Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media . [The most recent edition, incidentally, is available right downstairs, in Gov Docs at Ref PN4867.Z99 I47x ].

The LOC has a good reference page on newspaper finding tools.