INTERNET
Irish Times launches online archive
07-09-2007
by Emmet Ryan
The Irish Times is about to launch a digital archive, covering 150 years of newspaper history, through its Ireland.com website.
The Irish Times Digital Archive carries an exact reproduction of every printed edition of the Irish Times from 1859 to 2007. The online service will be available through Ireland.com from 10 September and is fully searchable. Visitors to Ireland.com will be able to search and review every edition of the Irish Times exactly as it was produced at the time of printing by accessing the archive.
"The idea of digitising the archive has been around for about two years now. Following some initial exploratory work it kicked off for real in January 2006," said Niall O'Connor, digitisation project manager with the Irish Times. "It will allow people worldwide to view the archive of the Irish Times. In the past they would only have been able to do this through microfilm but now they can access a searchable archive online."
US-based firm Olive Software provided the scanning service to create digital editions of the newspaper.
The new service was co-funded by the Irish Times and the Library Council of Ireland through the Department of the Environment. The archive will be free to access in all public libraries and in primary and secondary schools. Users in libraries can access the archive through the Library Council's Askaboutireland.ie website and O'Connor said some of the pages in the archive were designed to be specifically suited to this portal.
Existing Ireland.com subscribers will have free access to the archive for a promotional period -- from 10 to 30 September -- and some of the content will be free for anyone to view at the Ireland.com website. The remainder of the archive will require users to pay for the service.
O'Connor said Ireland.com would not release price details for access until after the service goes live, but he said it would follow a similar model to the existing Ireland.com service -- with users able to pay for daily, weekly, monthly or annual access. Ireland.com subscribers will have the option of purchasing the service as an add-on to existing accounts, while other users can opt to buy it as a standalone service without access to the rest of Ireland.com's services.
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