Newspapers on CD-ROM Newspapers on CD-ROM
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Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM Newspapers on CD-ROM Introduction This paper concentrates on British newspapers available in CD-ROM form. It Newspaper from the point-of-view looks at the characteristics of this form of publication of newspapers in comparison with the alternatives of hard-copy, To producers and most readers of microfilm and online, and discusses the newspapers a newspaper is primarily benefits and limitations of the medium something bought on the day of from the point of view of libraries and end- publication, providing, on a daily or weekly users. It does not provide a detailed basis, reporting and comment on current decription or evaluation of the individual events, backed up by features, listings and products, since this is available elsewhere other 'recreational' material. For both the (I), and since the products themselves are normal expectation is that the newspaper still evolving, nor does it cover overseas will be discarded after use. titles or indexes to and abstracts of To librarians and to researchers, however, newspapers available on CD-ROM. newspapers have long been recognised as valuable tools and information sources many years after their initial publication. The British Museum and later the British At the time of writing five CD-ROMs of UK Library have systematically collected newspaper titles are publicly available, some newspapers for the last 150 years and runs containing the text of more than one of local newspapers are among the most newspaper. The titles and the years of highly valued parts of public library local publication covered, together with history collections. publisher/distributor details are: Initially the only form in which newspapers could be kept for long term use The Times/The Sunday Times 1990- was as hard copy or originals, usually by Times Network Systems/Chadwyck-Healey binding the collected issues of a title into The Guardian 1990- volumes a month or year at a time. After Chadwyck-Healey World War I1 microfilm copies of newspapers became recognised as an The Independent/The Independent on acceptable surrogate for the originals Sunday 1989- offering the possibility, through the FT Profile/Chadwyck-Healey controlled storage of master negatives, of archival quality film of long term The Financial Times 1990- preservation beyond that likely to be feasible FT Profile/Chadwyck-Healey (at least economically) of the originals. The last decade has seen the growing The Northern Echo 1989- availability of the text content of certain The Northern Echo newspapers in electronic database form on With the exception of the Northern Echo online hosts such as FT PROFILE, bringing the data from each year of a title is usually to those users able to afford it access to very contained on a separate disk. large amounts of newspaper information Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM through the power of information retrieval prices are those of the cover-price of the software. The capability of CD-ROM to individual issues and do not include the cost handle large full-text databases has enabled of binding or other form of keeping the the publication of newspaper text copies fit for long term use. information in this medium and in the last In the case of The Guardian and The sixteen months has made electronic access Times these prices have been cut to it available for a more general audience. significantly since their original launch, Given the availability of newspaper while for all of the titles discounts are information in these four media, the choice available to public sector educational for libraries and for users is dependent on a organisations which reduces the price mixture of organisational or user needs and further for those users. on economic and technical considerations. I have not attempted to compare the costs Historically, national and public libraries of online use since these are variable, being have concentrated on collecting and , based on connect time, display charges and preserving for use the original newspapers telecommunciations costs, with searching or microfilm copies, with subject access across multiple titles and years the norm. limited to the availability of published or in- house produced indexes, while commercial Characteristics of CD-ROM in and other users, for whom the information Relation to Original Newspapers content of stories is the primary concern, have opted either to build collections of The first and obvious thing to say about newspaper cuttings or to use online CD-ROM versions of newspapers is that databases where the data range and title they are not a substitute medium for the coverage available meet their needs. primary purpose of newspapers identified above, i.e. the current provision of daily or weekly reporting of current events and the associated editorial, feature and leisure Where then do newspaper on CD-ROM fit material that accompanies it. Nor, like in the spectrum of choice and what benefits online files, do they provide a full archival and disadvantages do they offer compared electronic equivalent of the published to the alternatives? newspaper. Instead they provide an electronic archive Costs of the main information content of newspapers, the news stories, feature A comparison of the costs of annual articles, editorial and other matter but subscription prices for CD-ROMs with excluding a great deal of the material that those of microfilm or hard copy plus contributes to the identity of individual printed index shows the products to be newspaper titles and which is of interest to competitively priced. both current readers and future researchers. CD-ROM Microfilm Hard copy Index Times/SundayTimes£595 £700 £165 £450 Exclusions Guardian £495 £330 £145 £470 Independent/ Independent on Sunday £499 £610 £170 Material excluded from CD-ROMs varies Financial Times £900 £585 £170 £570 from product to product, although some Northern Echo £100 exclusions are common across all titles. The prices shown are for 1992 subscriptions In most cases photographs and other (some index prices based on conversions image and graphic material are currently from dollar prices at the time our excluded. This is likely to change as the subscriptions were paid). The hard copy technology develops. The 1991 end of year Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM disk from The Times contains several Benefits and Limitations of hundred photograhs but these represent CD-ROM only a small proportion of those published in the year and so far these are not well Benefits integrated with the articles which they The benefits of CD-ROM as a medium for illustrate. The announcement of the the publication of, and access to, newspaper forthcoming CD-ROM version of The material are similar to those of CD-ROM in Economist says that it will include 'graphics, general. charts, maps and tables where they are To the individual end-user they offer: thought to be important to the article'. the power of searching with information Advertisements are excluded in all cases, retrieval software, including Boolean logic, including the births, deathdmarriages adjacency searching, truncation etc, and the announcements of major interest to future ability to define searches by newspaper generations of family history researchers. specific information such as headlines, Most "recreational" material is excluded, bylines and issue dates. While taken for including puzzles, crosswords, cartoons, TV granted by the experienced online user the availability of this power to search large and sports fixture listings, recipes, and amounts of full-text data is a major advance weather reports. Many of these are features for the user accustomed to two step access which beyond their immediate appeal to the via a printed index and searching of hard purchaser of the original newspaper are of copy or microfilm newspapers. value and interest to future researchers. The power and sophistication of modern In other cases individual titles have microcomputers and related software in the adopted differing exclusion policies, often access to, and presentation of, information. based on differing interpretations of Examples include the use of colour, the copyright issues. Thus readers' letters are ability to display graphics, and the use of excluded from The Guardian but included in the Windows operating environment to the others. Where individual writers retain allow sophisticated presentation and copyright their articles may be excluded. interaction. News agency stories are often excluded, To the organisation they offer: the while tabular material such as stock market advantages of a known fixed cost, providing prices is generally excluded, even from The many of the benefits of on-line searching Financial Times. without connect time, display or In general the exclusions are similar to telecommunication charges. those in online files, almost certainly A facility suitable in most cases for direct because the online and CD-ROM files are end-user access without the need for trained intermediaries or the cost of administrative created from a common source. There may systems for monitoring and, where also be an underlying assumption that the appropriate, charging the costs of online information needs of CD-ROM users will be use. the same as those of the commercial and Compared to microfilm or hard copy similar users of on-line systems, that is newspapers CD-ROM offers significant primarily factual information from recent space saving. A year of the contents of one years and from the 'quality' newspapers. national newspaper will fit on a single CD- Experience at the Newspaper Library shows ROM compared to 24 reels of 35mm that the long term historical research use of microfilm or 12 bound volumes of hard newspapers is often different from, and copy. In volume terms the microfilm much more varied than, this. equivalent takes up 70 times the space of the Serials - Vol.