The Economist pone su hemeroteca en la red

Cuenta Stephen Brook en The Guardian que The Economist pretende ofrecer en internet todos sus archivos desde 1843 hasta 2003. Son más de 600.000 páginas de análisis e información. Todo parece indicar que el archivo será accesible vía suscripción a partir de diciembre de este año y que inicialmente estará dirigido a instituciones educativas, bibliotecas, organismos gubernamentales, empresas e instituciones financieras. El precio será de unas 1.500 libras, es decir unos 2.100 euros al cambio actual, si bien dependerá del tamaño y tipo de organización interesada.

Para Stephen Glover, de The Independent, se trata de una auténtica revolución que facilitará el trabajo de los investigadores y contribuirá a que la Historia dé al periodismo la importancia que se merece:

There is another reason why historians find it so difficult to get a handle on the nature of the relations between editors and leading politicians. Old newspapers are difficult to get to grips with. Most are not on microfilm, which is anyway laborious and fiddly. (..) It is one thing to check a fact in an old newspaper or read up an episode whose date you know; quite another to gain a complete sense of what was written about someone over a period of years in a whole range of newspapers.

(...)

This is an amazing revolution. No longer, perhaps, will we have to trudge up to the newspaper library in Colindale or, in my case, to the Bodleian in Oxford, where I was once told that some old newspapers were unfortunately unavailable because no one could fight his way through the stacks of other papers to retrieve them. What was lost or forgotten or at the very least difficult to recover will be instantaneously available not only to historians and journalists but also to the ordinary reader.