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Toronto Star archives

August 9, 2004 › Sandy McMurray | comment

The Toronto Star newspaper has launched Pages of the Past - a searchable archive that goes all the way back to 1892.

A free preview of the archive is available now. Presumably, they're going to start charging for access to the archive shortly, so you might want to explore a bit before the price goes up.

The archive was created by scanning more than 30,000 editions of the Toronto Star from microfilm to create high quality digital images of the original page. The pages were then scanned with optical character recognition (OCR) software, to make the text searchable, and converted to PDF format for easy download and viewing.

The Star is protecting its current product by placing a two year limit on current issues (i.e. the archive does not including any papers from the past two years.)

All in all, it's quite an archive, and quite a technical accomplishment.

August 9, 2004 › Sandy McMurray | comment on this item