The big news today is Google News Archive Search, a searchable archive of articles that, in some cases, date back 200+ years.
Some publishing partners include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale. See New York Times article for more.
I did a test search for “Wisconsin Law School.” The left side bar of the search results page contains a list of dates and publications in which articles were located. I’m a history buff, so I clicked on the “Before 1950” link. One of the more interesting articles is a Time magazine article from 1937 about the dean of the UW Law School, “good-natured, baldish, ruddy-cheeked Lloyd Kirkham Garrison.”
On the right, you can select “show timeline” to have the articles sorted by date. However, I found that the list of articles it produced was only a very small portion of the total articles.
Yeah – this is really cool, but the downside is that many of the articles you find are fee-based and come from multiple vendors. Before you go opening your wallet, write down the citation and see if the article is available elsewhere – i.e. your local library.
I agree with Dan Giancaterino’s (Jenkins Law Library Webblits) advice not to forget about the subscription databases available freely to you. In Wisconsin, it’s called Badgerlink.
Thanks to my colleague, Eric Taylor, for the tip about Google News Archive Search.